Meetings/About

From openSUSE

As openSUSE is a worldwide community program we need to use a medium that is worldwide accessable. So meetings will take place in the #openSUSE-project IRC channel. Every meeting should have a couple of things set up:

• Agenda
• Q/A section
• Transcript
• Announcement

Meetings Page

Every future meeting has to be added to the Meetings page. Every past meeting has to be added to the Meetings/Archive 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 (bugbot). It is an IRC bot you can bring into your channel which will automate the task of creating meeting 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 Francis who operates it.

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

Once you have finished your meeting you are supposed to link them from Meetings/Archive

Announcement

Once you have all this you can schedule your meeting. Please announce it to the mailinglist opensuse-announce. Please do this at least 5 days before the meeting takes place!

IRC Workflow/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 #your-channel

• 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

• The most important commands are:

#startmeeting - Starts a meeting. The calling nick becomes the chair. If any text is given on the rest of the line, this becomes the meeting topic.
#chair and #unchair -  Add new chairs to the meeting. The rest of the line is a list of nicks, separated by commas and/or spaces.
#topic - Set the current topic of discussion. MeetBot changes the topic in the channel.
#action - Add an ACTION item to the minutes. Provide irc nicks of people involved.
#info - Add an INFO item to the minutes.
#endmeeting - End a meeting, save logs, restore previous topic, give links to logs. 

• Make an introduction explaining this meeting. Suggestion:

  Welcome to the <Meeting Name> 
  The purpose of this meeting is <Meeting purpose>
  Some technicalities:
  This channel is moderated during the time of the meeting.
  But it has relaxed moderation set so the operators (but nobody else) can see what you're writing.
  So if you have a question or remark just write it. The moderator will give you a voice and you can
  repeat your question for everyone.
  The topics of this meeting are: <Meeting Topics>

• 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