IRC meetings are one of the most common forms of communication in the Fedora Project. All of the teams use the Python IRC Limnoria, nicknamed Zodbot, for running and managing meetings. Zodbot is using the MeetBot plugin for supybot/Limnoria to run and manage meetings. You can read more information about meetings, MeetBot, møte, Limnoria, or other details in their respective places.
This page explains how to run an effective meeting, steps you should follow when setting up meetings, and other useful information and tips to make sure you convey the most important info so it gets seen. This page follows and explains how one contributor, jflory7, runs meetings.
Running an effective meeting
Before jumping into the process and the steps you can follow, it's important to understand how to run an effective meeting and understanding your toolbox. MeetBot combined with møte will make a pretty HTML summary of your meeting for you, but only if you help MeetBot write it for you. Utilizing the summary and minutes feature of MeetBot enables your remote contributors or absent participants from getting the information they need from your meeting by a quick glance. Writing clean, to-the-point meeting minutes will help communicate goals, ongoing actions, and coordinating plans easier for participating and absent members.
Some general tips on taking MeetBot notes:
- Keep summary lines short and the to the point
- If discussing a hot topic, make sure to note agreement or some kind of end to the discussion
- Be consistent - if you're not consistent, it will become impossible to read the minutes
MeetBot Commands
All commands are taken from the MeetBot manual and displayed here for convenience.
| Command | Argument(s) | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| #startmeeting | <"pretty" name of meeting> | Starts a meeting. The calling nick becomes the chair. If any text is given on the rest of the line, this becomes the meeting topic (see below). | #startmeeting Fedora CommOps - 2016-08-30 |
| #meetingname | <"short" name of team> | Provide a friendly name which can be used as a variable in the filename patterns. In møte, this is used for categorizing your meetings together over time. It is extremely important to be consistent with this command, every time! | #meetingname commops |
| #chair | <IRC nick> | Add new chairs to the meeting. Can be one or multiple people. | #chair jflory7 puiterwijk mizmo |
| #unchair | <IRC nick> | Removes chair status from a user in the meeting. Can be one or multiple people. | #unchair jflory7 puiterwijk mizmo |
| #topic | <discussion topic> | Set the current topic of discussion. MeetBot changes the topic in the channel (saving the original topic to be restored at the end of the meeting). Useful for organizing discussion and remaining focused to the current discussion topic. | #topic Action items from last week |
| #info | <anything to make note of> | Add an INFO item to the minutes. The simplest way to make note of general information. | #info Fedora 25 releases in one more week |
| #link | <url> | Add a link to the minutes. The URL must be the first thing on the line, separated by a space from the rest of the line, and it will be properly hyperlinked. Using other commands to note links will not render them as links. | #link https://pagure.io/fedora-commops/issue/84 |
| #action | <IRC nick> <task> | Add an ACTION item to the minutes. Use IRC nicks of active people in the meeting and MeetBot will generate a listing of action items sorted by nick at the end of the meeting. Helpful for clearly communicating expected tasks and giving responsibility for something in a meeting. | #action jflory7 Contact Fedora Spins for information about new features this Fedora release |
| #agreed | <final agreement / conclusion> | Mark something as agreed on. Useful for notating a final decision, a vote on an issue, or anything with group consensus. Especially useful for communicating decisions. | #agreed Issue #22 in pagure-importer blocking Trac migration; will postpone migration by two weeks |
| #help | <something you need help with> | Add a HELP item to the minutes. Communicates when you or your team needs help with something. | #help Wiki gardening is needed on our sub-project page - volunteers needed! |
| #undo | - | Remove the last item from the meeting minutes. Only applies to commands which appear in the final output. | #undo |
| #nick | <any name> | Make a nick be recognized by MeetBot, even though it hasn't said anything. Useful for making a list of action items be grouped by this nick at the end of the meeting. Also useful for assigning work to a team. | #nick mattdm OR #nick commops |
| #endmeeting | - | End a meeting, save logs, restore previous topic, give links to logs. | #endmeeting |