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

["James Kempf" <kempf@docomolabs-usa.com>]

Hi Harald,

I think it would be worthwhile to have a designated secretary. However, as
with draft editors, finding someone who can take good minutes may be
difficult. Minute taking skill is not the same as draft writing or editing
skill, for example. One of the difficulties currently is that randomly
picking volunteers sometimes gets someone who is not particularly skilled at
minute taking. By recording that person as the officially designated "WG
Secretary" on the WG Web page, it becomes difficult if a person lacking in
minute taking skill is chosen, to change the position. This is a similar
problem to having a draft editor lacking in writing or editing skills, a
problem that crops up from time to time in WGs. Thus, care would need to be
exercised in selecting someone for this position. Currently, if a volunteer
doesn't happen to have particularly good minute taking skills, they aren't
chosen at the next meeting and it's not much of a problem. But I do agree
that having a designated secretary on the Web page would be much more
helpful for people who need to account for their time.

            jak


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Harald Tveit Alvestrand" <harald@alvestrand.no>
To: <wgchairs@ietf.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 8:09 PM
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
>
>
>