Re: [gentoo-project] March 2014 QA team meeting

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 10:09 PM, Tom Wijsman <TomWij@g.o> wrote:
> To make the problem go away forever; we would need to automate
> summarization, but when trying to deploy an automated computer
> system[1] to do the task it turned out that it summarized everything
> but the agenda items (eg. that summer is on its way), so, we've got to
> do it manually to assure a high quality of the meeting summaries.

If people can't be bothered to post the decisions in a summary,
they're not going to be bothered to log them in some software tool.
There is no reason a summary needs to be more than a few sentences for
a typical meeting (if you're voting on something really complex, it
should have been posted beforehand for review, as with a
GLEP/code/etc).

In cases where I've struggled with getting summaries out for meetings
worthy of them in other settings, one trick is to compose them
on-screen during the meeting while everybody watches, such that the
only thing that needs to be done is hit save/send/etc when the meeting
is done.  With something like Webex this can be done by hitting
reply-all to the meeting invite and composing the summary on-screen in
the form of notes, and basically anybody can chime in if something is
wrong.

Some simpler options for making that work would include something like
Google Docs or Etherpad (the latter perhaps being more appropriate in
this case).  Indeed, when making proposals for votes people could
actually just paste them right into the etherpad instead of dumping
them into IRC (or you could paste them into both places).  Then the
votes could be summarized right there (heck, everybody could just type
their own votes in there).  When done you just post it wherever it
goes (wiki, whatever).

This might also help to keep people more engaged in the meeting, as
everybody is focused on the production of the summary, which is
ultimately the only thing anybody will remember of the meeting a week
later anyway.

Just a thought...

Rich