Portal:Meetings/Howto

Every meeting should have two things set up. An entry in our event calendar so people know when meetings are, a meeting page in this wiki with an agenda, Q&A section and links to minutes so that everyone knows about the details of the meeting.

Announcing a Meeting

To announce a meeting, follow these steps:

Create a meeting page in the wiki, many teams not only use this as reference how to participate in the meeting but also to collect agenda and archive past minutes and action items.
Get the meeting in the calendar on news.o.o. The openSUSE Weekly News Team will see it there as well and add it to their calendar for the next version.
Announce it on your team mailing list
If this is a special meeting or you meet for the first time, announce it on news.opensuse.org with a separate announcement (entries in the event calendar are not announcements!) and send the announcement as well to the opensuse-announce@opensuse.org mailing list. The announcement on news.opensuse.org will show up automatically on the openSUSE forum in the 'Tech News' forum, it will also show up in a couple of other places like on Twitter and Facebook.

It is good practice to announce a preliminary agenda with topics for the meeting and not only that it will take place.

Calendar Entry

We have an event calendar on http://news.opensuse.org and meetings should be in there. Please contact the news team via news@opensuse.org to create an entry in the calendar for the event.

Meetings Page

Agenda

The agenda holds the topics that will be discussed in the meeting.

The agenda should be a wiki page editable for everyone.
The agenda should be finalized at least 2 days before the meeting takes place.
During the meeting you should stick to topics from the agenda.

Q&A section

The Q&A section is there so people who can't participate in the meeting can ask questions and make comments about topics from the agenda.

Minutes/Transcript/MeetBot

For post meeting discussions, people that couldn't attend etc. there should be full fledged meeting minutes. To help with this process you can use our MeetBot. It is an IRC bot you can bring into your channel which will automate the task of setting the channel topic, tracking action items, creating meeting minutes and a logging the overall conversation. To get the permissions to command the bot into your channel please contact admin@opensuse.org who operates it.

The resulting minutes will be stored at http://community.opensuse.org/meetings

IRC Technicalities

You need to be channel operator in the channel you want to hold the meeting in. Or have at least one channel operator present during the meeting who can operate the MeetBot.

/msg chanserv op #opensuse-monkeys

Before you start the meeting you have to give the MeetBot operator status too:

/mode +o bugbot

After that you can use the MeetBot to run the meeting. Commands are passed with the syntax

#command argument

To start a meeting use #startmeeting. The calling nick becomes the chairman. The argument is the topic of the meeting.

#startmeeting openSUSE Monkey Meeting

If there is more then one person that should be the chairman of the meeting you can use #chair. The argument is a list of nicks, separated by commas and/or spaces.

#chair joe

You can se the current topic of discussion. The MeetBot changes the topic in the channel automatically.

#topic Bananas

You can add an action item to the minutes. The argument is a nick and a text describing what to do.

#action joe buy more bananas

If you want to record general info's in the meeting minutes you can use #info.

#info You can find the biggest bananas on http://bananas.com

To end a meeting, save logs and restore the previous topic use #endmeeting

#endmeeting

There are a couple of others commands. You can find documentation, including examples, about the usage of MeetBot at http://meetbot.debian.net/Manual.html