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

[Aaron Falk <falk@isi.edu>]

I usually look for people active in the working group to take minutes,
and, hence, end up selecting from a relatively small pool -- in
effect nearly-dedicated minutes takers who understand an important
point when they it is raised in a meeting.  

A problem with this approach is that these folks often want to get
involved in the discussion and so the minutes I get from them have big
holes in them when the minute taker gets very involved in the
discussion (often at important points).  I'm not sure that a
position of wg secretary would solve this problem.  

One idea I've been toying with is to make an audio recording of the
meeting.  Primarily this would help me be sure I get all the important
points that arise.  It also might be made available along with the
minutes, although there are probably some privacy issues we need to
worry about.  (Or maybe not, this isn't so different from MBONE
coverage...) I'd be interested in feedback on this.  Audio recording
technology (digital or analog) is cheap and many hotels have the
ability to take a feed from the sound reinforcement system.  Just a
thought... 

Of course, this doesn't address the quality or timeliness of the
minutes.  It does however, put me in a position to ensure that I, as a
wg chair, can do something about it.

A final thought: pointing to some exemplary minutes might be
educational.  My observation is that Geoff Huston's minutes are
really, really good.  I don't know how much effort goes into putting
them together but the few times I've consulted them (for example
http://iab.potaroo.net/documents/docs/iab-open-meetings/ietf57/), I've
been impressed.

--aaron

Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
> 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
>