How do you keep records of your meetings?

[Matthew East]

On Thu, February 8, 2007 10:15 am, Nik Butler wrote:
> Taking
> time to read through IRC logs to get a feeling for the event and what
> its results were has a long slog through a long log of text and in
> general the context or value of any one conversation can be hard to
> define by just searching for the text alone. The scribe teams aim is to
> help start putting some structure to the conversations and the results.
> Specifically through using a seperate bot ( currently developed by
> ChrisOattes for use in UKTeam meetings ) to help track the topics,
> ideas, links , actions , votes and agreements which occur as part of a
> meeting. The bot has been a big help in formalising the results of the
> discussions and helping to keep things happening and moving forward.

I agree that reading through whole logs of a meeting is time consuming.
However, I do not agree that the use of a bot to automatically produce
meeting summaries is always helpful.

I have attended some UK team meetings, and I find that the use of the bot
has a number of drawbacks.

First of all, it creates an atmosphere where voting is a central part of
the meeting process. In my experience, the concept of *consensus* on an
agenda item is not nearly as simple as asking people to vote and spitting
out a result. That's not how the Ubuntu community generally works, as it
is not a democracy. For a start, different people's views have different
weights depending on the nature of the subject matter.

Secondly, I don't think that the consensus and ideas to have come out of a
meeting can always usefully be summed up in a single phrase. Again, the
range of people's ideas and views on a particular agenda item are a lot
more complex than that.

Thirdly, I personally find it distracting to have people using tags and
triggers all the time for the benefit of the bot. A meeting should be as
human as possible, and the presence of tags and triggers makes it
unfriendly to read and dehumanises the meeting process.

In my opinion, in most cases, there is only one reliable and effective way
to compile a summary of most types of meetings - having a human do them.
That is what I had hoped the scribes team would be focusing on primarily:
providing the resources to do that.

I certainly agree that making it easier for different groups to pool ideas
is a worthy aim.

Matt
-- 
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