Improving communication, transparency, and adoption

Apologies for that. It’s very much a work in progress! There should absolutely be a message to WG members saying “here are the draft minutes for your review, respond by date X”. We just don’t have this workflow properly set up yet, and I think we need advice about what mechanisms can support that workflow.

(Example, the message saying “please review draft” would presumably go to the WG Discourse, which would make the draft link public. But we don’t want the content to be public until the minutes are reviewed. So we need a way for just WG members to be able to access that link.)

Here is a possible workflow:

  1. All meeting attendees can edit the minutes, in real time, during the meeting. This is really, really helpful for spreading the load of minute-writing and capturing the flow of the meeting. But there should be one person who volunteers to lead the writing for each meeting.

  2. After the meeting, one (or two) people should then be in charge of the minutes, the “owner”.

  3. Owner writes to WG to invite them to review by a given date X.

  4. WG members review. (By commenting? By directly editing?) Owner coordinates changes.

  5. WG Chair signs off the minutes.

  6. Minutes published publicly.

This doesn’t need to be bureaucratic, or to take long. But it’s more likely to work if everyone knows who is doing what.

I am arguing that there should be some period during which the minutes are private, so members (esp the ones not present) can feed back about them. I am not arguing that it should be a long interval. That’s a matter for the WG itself.

If we agree the workflow in general terms, the next thing we need is a mechanism to support it. We’ve been using a Google doc so far, which is excellent for (1), but not so good for later steps. Maybe Github would be better? (Rust uses GitHub extensively for this, I think.) Advice needed.

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