Community Council/Meeting Guidelines/Meeting Guidelines Development

Introduction

This wiki page describes the development of the meeting guidelines for the regular Community Council meetings.

Related page: Meeting Guidelines

Development

Initial Situation

This wiki page contains the d 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 among others 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
(Several People)	In the first discussion in a Council Meeting, there has been a request to identify the age of the items and some other things, too. John: "One small suggestion - when I did the minutes for the f2f meeting I numbered the AIs according to the date of the meeting - e.g. 402.1 is the first AI from the 4th Feb meeting..." Martin: "and they should be sortable after age" Source: Meeting Minutes 2010-02-18 Comments by Christoph: The basic requirement is to know how old the action items are, so I initially proposed to keep the "record date" element. If not, then... New proposal is to use the format "YYYY-MM-DD#N" (e.g. 2010-02-03#2) and to order the elements in the agenda according to their age. Advantage: We get sorting for free and an unique numbering scheme, too. Disadvantage: It still feels a bit clumsy and the order may not reflect importance / similar topics.

Open Points

Questions

• 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 to agree on the minutes before they will be published?

Todo

• Template for the blog posting after a meeting (including tags to be used)