Re: Minutes and jabber logs

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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.

(All of this applies equally to meetings at IETF sites, interim meetings,
WG conference calls, and WG jabber conferences - readable minutes must be
agreed on the list.)

    Brian


David Harrington wrote:
Hi,

I would not like to see raw jabber logs included as part of the
minutes. The signal-to-noise ratio is way too low in many meetings.

Jabber logs written by a scribe do not do a good job representing the
body language and the nuances of speech that may be important to
really understand what a person said. I would also be concerned that
there are side-discussions in jabber that are not relayed to the whole
room; including those side conversations as a reflection of what was
said in the meeting is simply misleading.
It is the chair's job to provide a summary of the meeting for the
mailing list to see what was discussed and "decided". I do not think
the chair should be allowed to evade this responsibility by simply
posting a quick summary and the raw jabber logs to the mailing list as
the official minutes.

David Harrington
dharrington@xxxxxxxxxx dbharrington@xxxxxxxxxxx
ietfdbh@xxxxxxxxxxx



-----Original Message-----
From: Spencer Dawkins [mailto:spencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, July 17, 2006 11:18 AM
To: ietf@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Meetings in other regions


That said, and given the difficulties of balancing competing
priorities in site location, it seems reasonable to me to make
a decent, good-faith effort without getting overly bogged down
in "where should we meet?" discussions, and really try to get
the remote participation thing nailed down a little better.  The
ratio of good to bad remote meeting input has improved a lot
over the past year or so but there are still too many working
groups without a Jabber scribe in the room (which prevents remote
listeners from providing inputs), etc.

OK, this is only a thought, and I'm out of the process improvement business anyway, but I've been seeing a consistent improvement in the quality of jabber logs for at least two years, and I'm wondering if there are working groups who would be willing to try "minutes = chair summary plus jabber logs" for a few IETFs (without what we usually think of as "detailed


minutes"), and see if this is actually workable.

I'm a many-time repeat offender as WG note-taker, and am watching my notes look more and more like a jabber log with only one jabberer; the advantages of jabber (in my experience) are

- it's nice for the note-taker to be able to participate in the meeting - as an extreme case, in the SIPPING Ad Hoc on Friday, Gonzalo and Mary handed me the mike about twenty times, but very litte of what I said appeared in the notes, and it's worse when someone is already talking when I stop talking. That's typical in my experience. With Jabber, people can type until I get back to my seat.

- It's really nice when I misquote, or mis-attribute, something that was said and another jabberer corrects it right away. This is SO much better than the WG chair having to listen to the audio stream to check my notes after some number of days has elapsed (and sometimes all the chair can tell from the audio is that I got it wrong, without knowing what "right" would have been).

- and, obviously, this works better for remote participants (what's the alternative - send e-mail to the list?)

Now that all this stuff is on the IETF website, it should be more enduring than if the jabber rooms and logs were hosted somewhere else.

Of course, Jabber has to work; our wireless network has been pretty solid the last couple of meetings, but even so, if you offer a Jabber scribe an Ethernet connection and guaranteed power at the front of the room, that would be pretty compelling for me, most IETFs.

Thanks,

Spencer


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