Council Meetings

Council meeting process

This guide explains how to manage and run a Council IRC meeting. Many of the steps here could well apply to other groups that hold regular IRC meetings as well.

For a "Tickets and Ongoing" meeting

"Tickets and Ongoing" meetings happen every other week. They're held in the #fedora-meeting channel on Freenode. We don't want to be entirely ticket-driven (since that's a reactive process), but this helps keep important issues from slipping through the cracks.

Pre-meeting

1. Go through open tickets and select several that seem timely or otherwise worth real-time discussion.This is also a good time to poke forward any issues that don't really need to be at the meeting but need further action, or to close issues that are resolved — or which won't be resolved. We want to keep the open tickets reflective of actual work in progress, not merely things we hope to get to someday. (Ticket system or not, there's an infinite pool of potential work for the Council, and keeping open tickets which we have no practical plan to work on is a recipe for sadness all around.)

2. Consider other topics that might benefit from real-time discussion in order to move forward. Again, we don't want to block issues on waiting for "everyone in the room" conversations (when we have mailing lists and lazy consensus), but we've found that regular discussion is important.

3. Generate an email to the council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org list with the following template:

 
Schedule for Wednesday's Tickets and Ongoing Fedora Council Meeting (2024-04-17)

 

The Fedora Council will hold our regular "Tickets and Ongoing" meeting
at 14:00UTC in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UTCHowto

or run:
  date -d '2024-04-17 14:00 UTC'


Expected discussion items include:


YOUR AGENDA TIMES HERE


If you would like to add something to this agenda, you can reply to
this e-mail, file a new ticket at https://fedorahosted.org/council,
e-mail me directly, or bring it up at the end of the meeting, during
the open floor topic. Note that added topics may be deferred until
the following meeting. 

Day of meeting

1. Generate a text file from the following template:

 
#startmeeting Council (2024-04-17)
#meetingname council
#chair mattdm jkurik jwb langdon robyduck tatica bexelbie
#topic Introductions, Welcomes
#topic Today's Agenda
#topic next topic...
...
#topic Open Floor
#endmeeting

You can copy and paste in lines from this file as the meeting progresses.

Meeting time

1. Use the lines up to 'init process' to start the meeting.

2. Wait a few for people to show up.

3. Go through each topic. Watch time on each and if 15 minutes are reached, ask if people want to keep discussing that topic or move on.

4. Make liberal use of Zodbot commands like #topic/tt>, #info, and #help, to populate the meeting minutes.

Post meeting

1. The meeting minutes are automatically collected in Møte and emailed to meetingminutes. It might be nice to find this and also mail it to the list. (Ideally, we'd enhance meetbot to automatically send these minutes to the appropriate list. #help, please!)

2. Process through tickets comment/close them as appropriate.