Re: Minutes and jabber logs

["Spencer Dawkins" <spencer at mcsr-labs.org>]

Sorry, I should have responded to the first notes on-list...


> Just a reminder of what our process rules (RFC 2418) say:
>
>    All working group sessions (including those held outside of the IETF
>    meetings) shall be reported by making minutes available.  These
>    minutes should include the agenda for the session, an account of the
>    discussion including any decisions made, and a list of attendees. The
>    Working Group Chair is responsible for insuring that session minutes
>    are written and distributed, though the actual task may be performed
>    by someone designated by the Working Group Chair. The minutes shall
>    be submitted in printable ASCII text ...
>
> We don't insist on the list of attendees when that is in the blue sheets,
> but it's clear that the minutes have to be readable ("an account of the
> discussion including any decisions made") and that is not usually
> the state of a raw jabber log. It's important, since the decisions taken
> in a meeting have to be confirmed on the list - if the minutes are
> properly written, it's enough to ask for agreement on the minutes.
>
> A carefully edited jabber log can of course be just fine.

You know, there was a day when "he said/she said" minutes were actually 
discouraged at the IETF... not that I've found a pointer to that written 
down anywhere, but people often pointed this out when I started volunteering 
to take notes (somewhere around the Yokohama timeframe).

Since this was my suggestion, I should point out that my "carefully edited" 
NON-jabber minutes look a heckuva lot like what working group chairs often 
post as their minutes, without summary, in the proceedings.

My opinion, which is not the only one available on earth, is that

if one working group chair (and preferably all of the working group's 
chairs) reviews careful jabber logs, which I was suggesting could be checked 
for accuracy by anyone else participating in the meeting, either onsite or 
remotely, while the jabbering scribe was still typing, and

reviews the audio for anything that is still unclear and violates either 
memory or sanity, and

then summarizes the accummulated notes in a clear fashion saying

- these were the topics,

- these were the issues that were discussed,

- these were the major points that were raised,

- these were the sense-of-the-room calls that will be verified on the 
mailing list,

and then sends the summary, pointers to the presentations, pointers to the 
jabber log, and pointers to the audio to the working group mailing list for 
review, which is a lot more likely to happen with a summary,

and then posts all of this to the proceedings,

that would be a great leap forward from what is produced today.

For reference, my (non-jabber) notes from Montreal were

BEHAVE - 19KB
SIP - 31 KB
SIPPING -52 KB
SIPSEC - 14 KB

and, since I'm rereading them today for my own trip report, it's not that 
easy to go through the non-jabber notes, either.

*I* wish that I'd had help from other people in producing them, and the only 
way I know how to collaboratively produce this kind of semi-transcript is 
using jabber. Other opinions may be present on this mailing list...

Thanks,

Spencer 



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