[Infrastructure] Issues with Minutes

Mon Dec 16 12:06:48 MST 2019

That’s a good idea to include! Dimitris, I’m definitely not suggesting modifying the minutes at this point: it takes long enough to get F2F minutes approved that I’d never suggest going back to the approval process for editing-level changes. I know there are several people who go over the minutes to try and clean them up and that’s much appreciated—I’d just much rather the minute-takers be paying some of that cost too. :)

One thing that might help is to include a reminder to minute-takers to ensure they’re reviewing minutes after assembling them so they’re legible and comprehensible; the discussion about tooling should help here as well. One other thing that might help a lot is if we agreed on a rough standard for how to do minuting, especially for some of the back-and-forth discussions or Q&A sessions we have: everyone seems to pick a different way of notating who’s speaking and who said what, and that can make things very difficult to read. If we agreed on a standardized format that might make it easier—something like:
If you are minuting a conversation between multiple parties, be sure to attribute statements clearly in the minutes. Each speaker’s contribution should be on a separate line, and should be prefaced with the name and company of the speaker (initials are acceptable if you include expansions or a key). For example, here is a conversation between three people:
Mercutio Organa (MO), Crufty Kluge LLP> Basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes—
Heinz Doofenshmirtz (HD), DEI> —it’s produced by the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive diractance, yes. But what about side-fumbling?
Abby Chatterjee (AC), WeatherCopters Inc.> That’s prevented by the ambifacient lunar waneshaft, which includes six hydrocoptic marzelvanes.
MO> What kind of winding are we using for that?
AC> Normal—it’s the lotus O-deltoid type in panendermic semiboloid slots of the stator.
If you’re minuting a question-and-answer session, be sure to place question and answer on separate lines, and note clearly who is providing the question and the answer. For instance:
Abby Chatterjee, WeatherCopters Inc.> Are the spurving bearings offset at all?
Heinz Doofenshmirtz, DEI> No, they’re placed in a direct line with the panametric fan.

Or does that seem too prescriptive? I like Ryan’s idea of templates for minuting sessions; perhaps the above could be placed into a quick doc template in the wiki for copy-pasting into minutes pages?

--
Jos Purvis (jopurvis at cisco.com<mailto:jopurvis at cisco.com>)
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From: Ben Wilson <benwilsonusa at gmail.com>
Date: Monday, December 16, 2019 at 12:47 PM
To: "Dimitris Zacharopoulos (HARICA)" <dzacharo at harica.gr>
Cc: "Jos Purvis (jopurvis)" <jopurvis at cisco.com>, "infrastructure at cabforum.org" <infrastructure at cabforum.org>
Subject: Re: [Infrastructure] Issues with Minutes

For one or two of the F2F minutes in the past, we used an explanation at the beginning - something like, "inconsistencies are due to the fact that the minutes have been prepared by many people who volunteered as note takers, etc."

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 10:25 AM Dimitris Zacharopoulos (HARICA) <dzacharo at harica.gr<mailto:dzacharo at harica.gr>> wrote:

On 2019-12-16 6:09 μ.μ., Jos Purvis (jopurvis) 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.

Hi Jos,

There are several members that try to improve the quality of the minutes, both in quantity and quality :-) We had a long review period for the approval of the F2F minutes. My expectation is that anyone can edit the minutes when they are in the review process, especially if the edits are to improve language (grammar, syntax, etc). Contributions from native English speakers in this area is greatly appreciated!

Now that the minutes are approved I don't think we can go back and correct them. I would only go through an update process if what is currently written is not accurate or doesn't capture one's opinion correctly. IMO typos or grammatical changes are not a very strong reasons to go through this process.

Thanks,
Dimitris.
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