[Infrastructure] Meeting Minutes / Etherpad

Ryan Sleevi sleevi at google.com
Fri Nov 8 14:04:16 MST 2019


Right. I think there's two parts we should separate: collaborating
real-time and collaborative editing post-facto. Etherpad gives us both, but
it's not necessarily want we want for that second part.

I think in terms of use cases, we talked about having real time minutes
compiled by minute takers (and collaborators), during the meeting. I think
this actively requires *requiring* minute takers use whatever collaborative
tooling is there, and not simply relying on them to publish minutes after
the fact. This will, admittedly, limit some of the options for minute
takers, but addresses the long-standing issue of having trouble getting and
collaborating on minutes (especially with post-facto discussions/debates
about their accuracy)

Once that meeting is complete, however, we should move those minutes into
the collaborative editing post-facto. And we've got a solution for that so
far, via the Wiki, and we've already seen the F2F minutes shift over there.
As those are collaborated on, they're eventually finalized (and also record
fine-grained edit history), and we publish those to the mailing list and
durable forms.

Using GDocs or Etherpad or Sharepoint or Slack or IRC for the real-time are
all fine by me. Whether it's "start a thread in slack" to correct minutes
or "overwrite the text" (in GDocs or Etherpad or Sharepoint) makes... not
much difference to me. I think, of all of these, Etherpad is the easiest to
get started with, because it doesn't require figuring out the sharing
settings in GDocs or Sharepoint or the like, or making sure folks have an
account, or allowing global edits and hoping everyone identifies themselves.

So "Run Etherpad on a CABF server and use it for real-time minutes,
requiring minute takers to use it. Following the completion of the meeting
(plus some slop time? like an hour or two?), post minutes to the Wiki for
collaborative editing" seems... viable?

On Thu, Nov 7, 2019 at 12:04 PM Wayne Thayer <wthayer at mozilla.com> wrote:

> What are the requirements? If this is for collaborating on minutes that
> will then be published somewhere permanent, do we need to worry about
> losing the data? And if these are unpublished minutes, do they need to be
> secured? These answers might favor one solution over the other. Meanwhile,
> I don't have a strong preference.
>
> On Thu, Nov 7, 2019 at 7:29 AM Jos Purvis (jopurvis) <jopurvis at cisco.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The experiment with using Etherpad for minute-taking during the meetings
>> seemed to go OK this time. While observing the minutes assembly (and Ryan’s
>> observation that Etherpad-as-a-service will be discontinued in December), I
>> noted to Wayne that we could easily stand up an Etherpad service on a CABF
>> host. He wondered whether there were advantages to doing that vs. Google
>> Docs (which people are likely more familiar with), and the only real
>> advantage I could come up with was that by doing it on a CABF server, we
>> could ensure that copies of documents weren’t “owned” in Google by any
>> single member. That might not be a good trade-off, though, so I thought I’d
>> toss it here and see what people thought. We came up with a couple
>> possibilities:
>>
>>    1. Run Etherpad on a CABF server and use it for official minutes,
>>    encouraging (not requiring) members to use it.
>>    2. Encourage the use of GDocs for collaborative work, but create a
>>    cabf at gmail.com or similar account that could be added to each
>>    document. A little scripting, and that CABF shared account could likely
>>    make a backup copy of any document it’s added to, ensuring that the CABF
>>    always has copies of materials that will survive individual members.
>>    3. Jos is again inventing a solution for a non-existent problem, and
>>    we’re probably good to keep going how we are. :)
>>
>>
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jos Purvis (jopurvis at cisco.com)
>> .:|:.:|:. cisco systems  | Cryptographic Services
>> PGP: 0xFD802FEE07D19105  | +1 919.991.9114 <(919)%20991-9114> (desk)
>>
>>
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