Meeting time is very valuable; for example, with 12 people in a meeting, five minutes is one person-hour. Good records preserve the value of the time spent in meetings.
Meeting experts are unanimous on this point: even with the ubiquitous tools of organization and sharing ideas -- whiteboards, flip charts, Post-it notes -- the capacity for misunderstanding is unlimited. Which is another reason companies turn to computer technology. The best way to avoid that misunderstanding is to convert from "meeting" to "doing" -- where the "doing" focuses on the creation of shared documents that lead to action. -- The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings, Fast Company April/May 1996, Page 122 By: Eric Matson
see also: ScheduledTopicChat
Noodling on an ontology of meetings:
meeting proposal, invitation (hmm... RdfCalendar); meeting call. critical resource
attendee, regrets, excused, expected (hmm... photographic attendance records... ImageDescription)
- chair, scribe
agendum/agenda item, agenda request, ActionItems
- straw-poll, proposal, second, objection/dissent, abstain; consensus, decision (hm... issue?)
an idea: "my actions" subscription service: enhance the scribe tool to use hcalendar markup for VTODOs; enhance asICal.py from palmagent to grok and to produce RDF Calendar; figure out some way to maintain a "latest meeting record" link and use SPARQL to query for just my actions.
Risks to manage:
- "hey! you didn't tell me that what I said in that meeting was going to be recorded for all the world to see!". Make sure attendees know in advance that the meeting is being recorded, and how, and what opportunities they'll have to review and correct the record.
While it might seem optimal to have the state of the meeting always available via HTTP, getting latency expectations met is unworkable. (e.g. you change the agenda during the meeting, but folks are disconnected.)
MidwestWeeklyAgenda is a pattern that seems to work: the agenda is proposed in a message 24hrs in advance and reviewed/negotiated during the meeting. The record is an email thread, started within a day or 2 and culminating in a resolution at the following meeting.
References:
swebscrape: scraping RDF from the minutes Brian McBride 14 Apr 2003 to RDF Core WG
RIC from the mindswap group
DAML Agenda by Mike Dean
Meeting Records in RDF, DanConnolly, started Nov 2000, revised Jun 2002
mtgppl.n3 -- formalizing "you can't assign an action to somebody who isn't here" chumped 2003-04-17 02:00
MeetingTakingPlace, which used to be in the cyc social vocab and is in some of the RDF/DAML/OWL versions of cyc that they've released
DAWG Sep 2004 meeting grddl'd with grokftf.xsl to get formal version in RDF