[Infrastructure] Issues with Minutes

[Ryan Sleevi]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 11:10 AM Jos Purvis (jopurvis) <jopurvis at cisco.com>
wrote:

> Having now published the minutes from a bunch of meetings plus the last
> couple face-to-face minutes, I’m struggling a bit. The minutes from the
> last F2F in particular have a number of rather…interesting textual
> approaches, shall we say (indifferent or missing capitalization, typos,
> curious formatting, etc.), and it’s a real struggle to publish those as
> approved because they’re difficult to read and follow, in addition to not
> being the best representation of the Forum overall.
>
>
>
> I hesitate to say anything because I know we have a number of members for
> whom English is not a first language (although many of those do not take
> minutes, it seems like), and I know even for people that do have English as
> a first language some of this stuff can be a struggle. I don’t mind
> correcting obvious typos as we go, but the F2F minutes are enormous (very
> time-consuming to reformat and edit), and I get very nervous about removing
> editorial comments or re-rendering sentences when publishing things,
> because I don’t ever want to modify the meaning of something away from what
> was formally approved. Would it be too much to request that minute-takers
> take a minute to review and clean up minutes when uploading? Not sure how
> to bring this up with the Forum.
>

I'm not sure if we want to take this up more broadly on the Forum mailing
list vs infrastructure?

That is, I see there being two dimensions:
1) Quality and nature of minutes, which I think is something probably more
appropriate for Forum wide discussion
  - FWIW, I raised similar concerns with Dimitris this go around, and both
he and I spent quite a bit of time reviewing the minutes and trying to get
things internally consistent
2) Tooling to support quality minute taking
  - This is definitely our wheelhouse and mandate
  - The discussion around Etherpad is one part of this
  - There was the discussion about *requiring* Etherpad, for real time
minute-taking and editing, precisely so we could pay these costs early/real
time

 It'd be good to redirect 1 to the public@ list, but with 2, it may be
worth discussing what sort of tooling we can and should do.

Among other things, would it make sense to have a common format/template,
based on how past minutes have gone, to capture sessions? For example, at
the risk of creating a premature ontology, it seems our sessions usually
boil down into one of two groups: "presentation and discussion" or "lecture
and Q&A". Both phrases seem unduly pejorative, but mostly I'm trying to
highlight that we seem to either have freewheeling conversations about
open-ended problems, or are discussing specific clarifying Q&As about
particular solutions or concrete problem statements/proposals. Does that
match your experience with our past few F2F sessions and the WG sessions?
Would it make sense to find ways to capture those conversations, or at
least align them post-facto to a consistent form?
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