RE: A concept resurrected(?) - WG secretary?

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

At 10:18 PM 10/8/2003, Chris Apple wrote:
>I definitely think its worth trying.
>
>The way you described the position morphing over time makes it seem like
>a more appropriate title might be WG Project Manager - who happens to be
>accountable for recording and publishing meeting minutes (among other
>things).

It's a big leap from note taker to project manager.
I think the WG Chair(s) are responsible for the
WG projects, and this role should not be delegated.

I like to have 2 or 3 people taking notes and then I
write the minutes from multiple sets of notes.

I don't know if creating an official position will
improve the situation.  Perhaps some guidelines
for note takers and minutes writers (ala ID-nits)
will help more.  I wish note takers would do
a better job of capturing context and every decision
and action item made, rather than trying to transcribe
every conversation in the meeting.


>Chris Apple - Principal Architect

Andy


>DSI Consulting, Inc.
>
>mailto:capple@dsi-consulting.net
>
>http://www.dsi-consulting.com
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-wgchairs@ietf.org [mailto:owner-wgchairs@ietf.org] On Behalf Of
>Harald Tveit Alvestrand
>Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 11:09 PM
>To: wgchairs@ietf.org
>Subject: A concept resurrected(?) - WG secretary?
>
>
>The IESG was discussing the state of minutes from WG meetings last week.
>
>Generally, there are problems with both quality and timeliness of meeting 
>minutes - they are often late to the secretariat, or do not arrive at all; 
>their format varies widely, and it can be very hard from some of the 
>minutes to identify the decisions the WG thought that it reached at the 
>meeting.
>
>Since this forms part of the record of the standards process, which is 
>important in order to document that we have followed our open process, this 
>is not great.
>
>We then remembered the following passage from RFC 2418 (WG guidelines):
>
>6.2. WG Secretary
>
>   Taking minutes and editing working group documents often is performed
>   by a specifically-designated participant or set of participants.  In
>   this role, the Secretary's job is to record WG decisions, rather than
>   to perform basic specification.
>
>We've mostly not done this in later years, most chairs instead doing the 
>"does anyone want to volunteer to take minutes" style.
>However, it might be a worthwhile thing to do.
>
>I checked with the secretariat - it's a relatively trivial job to add the 
>role of "WG Secretary" to IETF WG charters, so that there's both public 
>knowledge of who has the post and some "payback" for it - and having the 
>people be formally identified and committed would also allow us to do 
>things like targeting them for information, or engaging them in discussion, 
>on how this role needs to be performed.
>One could also imagine this role subsuming the role of "WG facilitator", 
>and being also a natural first choice for things like issue tracking.
>
>But the obvious overhead is that the WG chairs have to identify and recruit 
>people to fill these positions.
>
>What do the WG chairs think? Is anyone doing this at present? Is it worth 
>trying?
>
>                      Harald