MidwestWeeklyAgenda

For groups with an established charter, regular weekly teleconference, membership rules, homepage, IRC channel, and issues list as well as documents etc., the midwest agenda pattern seems to work well:

1. convene, take roll, review records and agenda
   • homepage of group that is convening
   • date and time of this meeting, in UTC, perhaps in a few local times
   • telephone number, access code
   • IRC channel, pointer to where log will be
   • today's scribe
   • known regrets (if membership rules are less clear, explicitly enumerating the expected attendees is useful)
   • chair (often obvious and can be left out)
   • PROPOSED: to approve last week's MeetingRecords, noting any ammendments
   • note date of next meeting; recruit scribe
   • note any actions that are complete and don't seem to merit discussion
   • note any actions to continue without discussion
   • comments on the agenda?
2. issue: color of exterior paint
   • ACTION John Doe: evaluate impact of changing from green to blue
3. ...

The agenda is proposed in a message 24hrs in advance and reviewed/negotiated during the meeting. Wiki:ThreeExamples: DAWG 30 Nov 2004, RDF Core 2003-09-19, and XML Core WG agendas by Paul Grosso from ~1999 (not public).

The agenda is flat (no item 2.1) because it's simple and it's what Zakim's agenda tracking supports.

Note that each action is consciuosly either scheduled for discussion under a substantive agendum or noted without discussion during review of the agenda. A "review of misc actions" item or a pair of items "note completed actions" and "note continued actions" separate from the "1. convene ..." item are very well, but those are one round-trip thru the audio channel, ala "the agenda notes several actions to continue without discussion; any comments?" and if anyone wants to discuss an action, the agenda is adjusted. We avoid BulkActionReview.

For MeetingRecords, we use an email thread, started within a day or 2 and culminating in a resolution at the following meeting. A scribe is recruited in advance of the meeting; it's efficient to do that the week before, when you're noting the date of the next meeting and double-checking that you have all the critical resources available. IRC is a handy supplement to the record. If you're using RRSAgent, you can compute the address of the log before the meeting and include that in the agenda. Very handy, espcially in case the scribe is late getting the edited minutes together.

---

ToDo: referring to people... surnames, abbreviations... the tracker IRC bot knows how to do it.

mtgppl.n3 -- formalizing "you can't assign an action to somebody who isn't here" with mtgppl.n3

DanConnolly has started automating this agenda style a bit; see the DAWG Makefile.