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

["bill" <bill@strahm.net>]

Ok, I have seen some of the discussions on this... Now we are a
technology based organization...

How large would the files be to store voice quality audio of the
meetings (so we meet for about 180 hours a year * about 10 WG per hour
or 1800 hours of audio a year  -- how much space exists on the hard
drives at www.ietf.org ???  Can we make useful usable voice recordings
for posterity ?

The other interesting question is quality of notes - it might be worth a
word by word blow by blow notes with an overview/summary by the WG
chairs.  That said there are transcription services that can turn audio
into a typed file (heck some of us can do it on the cheap - but I am
assuming we value our time at X and we can find some service to do it
for X/4) I am not suggesting that the IETF pay for this at this time -
but if someone told me I could spend 20 bucks to turn an hour of mp3
that I capture at the meeting into blow by blow notes, I'd be tempted to
pay the cash out of my pocket, and produce a summary myself

Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-wgchairs@ietf.org [mailto:owner-wgchairs@ietf.org] On Behalf
Of Harald Tveit Alvestrand
Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 8:09 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