[Infrastructure] Meeting Minutes / Etherpad

[Ryan Sleevi]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 11:39 AM Dimitris Zacharopoulos (HARICA) <
dzacharo at harica.gr> wrote:

>
>
> On 2019-11-11 5:09 μ.μ., Ryan Sleevi wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 12:06 AM Dimitris Zacharopoulos (HARICA) <
> dzacharo at harica.gr> wrote:
>
>>
>> I am not comfortable with "requiring" minute-takers to use Etherpad. A
>> minute-taker could choose to use a paper notepad. Most people will prefer
>> the collaborating real-time tool as suggested.
>>
>
> Could you explain why? We've already seen significant issues with the
> minutes *not* done in Etherpad in our most recent F2F?
>
>
> Despite my recommendation, as the Chair, for Etherpad to be used, some
> minute-takers still preferred their own solutions for taking notes. Some
> even decided to wait for the recording in order to provide the minutes.
> Therefore, I don't think it would be feasible or acceptable by members to
> "enforce" (or require) that a specific tool like Etherpad is used.
>

I'm not sure this really gets to any substance, though. That's just
describing the status quo - with all of its issues.

The minute takers who used Etherpad tended to have lower-quality minutes,
and required more of members to go back and correct. For example, we see in
the Minutes people still doing explicitly what it unproductive - dumping
entire presentations into the minutes via copy/paste.

Yes, it's incumbent upon each WG to settle on what they want for minute
taking - i.e. this Forum SC will not be able to declare (of course, we can
always go to a Forum vote for WG-wide rules) - but the reality is that bad
minutes are *worse* than no minutes because they have the appearance of
being useful, but take more work to correct, and result in lower quality
minutes due to anchoring on poor minutes.

If someone's not comfortable with Etherpad, or taking real time minutes, we
should perhaps just suggest they shouldn't be minute takers. I don't think
that's a problem, I don't think we need to have everyone rotate and take
minutes, and plenty of SDOs survive just fine with this model.


>
>
> While it sounds like you're in agreement for the follow-up, I don't think
> there's a clear understanding about your discomfort or how to address it,
> especially in light of the issues we've seen and continue to see. The
> alternative seemingly being presented is just to ignore those issues, and
> that seems like a real detriment.
>
>
> In the absence of secretariat, we have to work in best effort mode. Based
> on previous experience, in case where minutes are inaccurate/incomplete,
> and this is somehow called out by someone, our options include assigning it
> to another minute taker who can listen to the recording and improve/correct
> the minutes. I can already see the improvement of the quality and the
> volume of minutes already on the wiki compared to the previous F2F. I'm not
> sure if you have a proposal that will improve things even more.
>

As noted above, the minutes that didn't use Etherpad are considerably worse
quality, and require considerably more effort to correct. Assigning a
replacement minute taker post-facto is not, in my mind, an improvement or a
desirable outcome. That's precisely the point - if folks are uncomfortable
taking real time minutes to allow real time correction and editing while
discussions are still fresh, then we shouldn't require them to take minutes.


>
>
> Thanks,
> Dimitris.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://cabforum.org/pipermail/infrastructure/attachments/20191111/4f40fcd1/attachment.html>