Community Council/Meeting Guidelines/Meeting Guidelines Development

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Introduction

Current Situation

This wiki page contains a proposal to make Community Council status meetings a bit more efficient. Today, most of the meetings are held in the IRC with an already prepared agenda. Once the meeting is finished, both the full IRC log and the new action items are published in the wiki.

This procedure has its downsides, especially if council members haven't been able to prepare information or work on action items. Sometimes this causes the status meeting turn to a working meeting. Even the role „Council Coordinator“, which is meant to remind the community members to fulfill their duties in advance, did not finally solve that problem.

During the face-to-face meeting in Hamburg, some proposals to improve the situation have been discussed. The main idea is to prepare the minutes in advance and to discuss the state during the meeting which might be held via IRC or – more efficient – via phone. Finally, the minutes are published to the community.

Goals

  • More efficient meetings for the Community Council
  • Faster and more focused information for both the community and the Community Council deputies
  • Easier distribution of information for the community

Requirements and Wishes

The following table summarizes the requirements and wishes of some of the council members.

Louis Use of phone instead of IRC.
Stefan Instead of the wiki, the information may be collected via blog postings in advance.
Mathias Some people may not want to use a blog, therefore it shouldn't be a hard requirement.
Jürgen Keep it simple!
Stefan

Is there any extension which can be used to publish the information automatically? For example a RSS feed which can be used for the blogs/planets?

Comment by Christoph: There is some information concerning RSS feeds at Wikipedia:Syndication

Proposal

Procedure

Note: Once the proposal is accepted by the Community Council – if it is accepted at all – it will be described in detail and published on a separate wiki page.

  1. A wiki page serves both as the agenda and presents the results of the last Community Council meeting. Besides that, the wiki page is intended to collect new topics which might be relevant for the Community Council. These topics might be raised by any community member – like today.
  2. A few days before a regular Community Council meeting …
    1. The Community Council Coordinator (or anybody who thinks it might be high time) asks the Community Council members on council-discuss to update the status of the action items and status.
    2. Each Community Council member updates his/her action items and outlines intermediate or final results. The description should match the complexity of the action item and should be – hopefully – understandable without any further explanation.
  3. During the Community Council Meeting …
    1. One Community Council member agrees to work on the minutes of the meeting. The already introduced wiki page serves as a basis for that.
    2. The Community Council members accept or reject newly proposed topics. If not yet done (e.g. via mail), a responsible person is selected, the next few steps are quickly outlined and a due date is chosen. The accepted topic is added to "Current Topics" later on.
  4. It continues with “Current Topics”:
    1. For each topic, the action item owners present the intermediate or final results. If the description is missing any important information, the keeper of the minutes adds it.
    2. If there are open questions concerning this topic, then there might be a short discussion. If the topic requires some more attention, then the discussion should be continued off-line (e.g. after the Community Council meeting).
    3. If a topic is accepted to be "finalized", then the keeper of the minutes will move this item to the section “Finalized Topics”.
  5. Directly / shortly after the Community Council Meeting …
    1. The keeper of the minutes will remove the previously “Closed Topics” so that only recently closed ones will appear.
    2. The keeper of the minutes will copy the content of the wiki page to another one which serves as a history of all meetings – like today.
    3. The keeper of the minutes informs the public about the meeting: a short mail to the council-discuss mailing list and to the responsible for the OpenOffice.org newsletter.

Template for Wiki Page Structure

The following proposal outlines the revised wiki page structure. This structure seems to work well in similar working environments:

  • Upcoming Meeting: date and location
  • Newly Proposed Topics: If possible, a rather formal description of the request stated by any Community Member. If possible questions like “What?”, “Why?”, or “Urgency?” should already been answered and information like “Record Date” be added. Since only few members will consider to post this information directly, the Community Members serve as proxies to add this information and to inform the other members in advance – just like it is handled today.
  • Current Topics: The section current topics lists all current action items with the following information... Here is an example which is – for reasons of simplicity – provided text-only.
    • Topic: Proposal for both a new Community Council meeting minutes template and general improvements
    • Record Date: 2010-02-04
    • Last Update: 2010-02-17
    • Responsible: Christoph
    • Explanation:
      • In the face-to-face meeting it has been decided to improve the meeting minutes template and other things.
      • The current issues have been outlined and a proposal has been worked out and is available here (link).
      • Next steps: The proposal will be presented to the Community Council that may accept it. If the procedure and the template are accepted, a more detailed documentation will be worked out. A final decision for becoming official will be requested by the Community Council.
  • Finalized Topics: This section will contain the currently finalized topics

Template for Mail, Blog Posting

(to be worked on)

Open Points

Question

  • Phone conference: Do we have numbers for a phone conference or at least access to a “free” audio/video conference system?
  • Grouping of topics: If many topics are in work, will it make sense to group them (e.g. community, development, …)?
  • Live editing: If the moderator of the Community Council meeting works on the minutes during the meeting, is there any chance to track the changes „live“ so that at least the participants can check for completeness and comprehensibility?
  • Keeper of the minutes: Is there any reasonable responsibility, e.g. the Community Council Char, Community Council Coordinator, “rotating” system, … ?
  • Agreement on minutes: Is there a need for agreeing on the minutes before it will be published?

Todo

  • Detailed description of the whole procedure
  • Template for the email message to the council-discuss list after a meeting
  • Template for the blog posting after a meeting (including tags to be used)
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