How to run a meeting

Introduction

These are instructions describing how we run meetings at Sugar Labs. It was originally written for Sugar on a Stick meetings and is based on the Fedora Marketing Meeting SOP.

Examples

You can see examples of past meetings at Sugar on a Stick meetings#Minutes.

Instructions

Make an agenda

Make a simple bullet list of topics to talk about at Sugar on a Stick meetings#Agenda - if you need help, ask on the list or on IRC for things people would like to discuss.

Announce the meeting

Email the soas list with a meeting announcement that includes a link to the agenda. Here is an example announcement - it's very simple. There's also a template #Meeting announcement you can use.

Run the meeting

Show up on IRC a few minutes early, announce the meeting (say something in-channel like "the meeting is starting in N minutes!") in both the meeting channel and #sugar, and then start the meeting with the #startmeeting command (just type that into the channel).

See this log for a quick runthrough of meetbot commands in action, and the Fedora wiki's guide to meeting bots for a full list of meeting commands.

To end the meeting, use the #endmeeting command. (Again, just type that into the channel.)

Publish the meeting notes

Once you #endmeeting, the meeting bot will spew out some stuff that looks like this:

21:01 -!- meeting changed the topic of #sugar-meeting to: <OLD TOPIC>
21:01 < meeting> Meeting ended <DATETIME>. 
Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot .
21:01 < meeting> Minutes:  <LINK>
21:01 < meeting> Minutes (text): <LINK>
21:01 < meeting> Log: <LINK>

In other words, the meeting bot:

• changes the channel topic back to whatever it was before the meeting
• announces that the meeting has ended
• creates links to the minutes (in html), the minutes in text, and the full IRC log.

Here's what you have to do:

1. Take one of the "Minutes" links and add it to the list of meeting minutes at Sugar on a Stick meetings#Minutes.
2. Email the soas list with the link to the meeting minutes and a copy-paste of the text minutes. A template can be found at #Meeting notes to the soas list; it's taken from this email as an example.
3. That's it! You're done!

Templates

Meeting announcement

Subject: Sugar on a Stick weekly meeting, DATE/TIME in CHANNEL

Details and agenda at Sugar on a Stick meetings.

See you folks there!

Meeting notes to the soas list

Thanks to everyone who came to the meeting!

Minutes are at Link to the text version of the meeting minutes (zodbot-generated) and the full log is available at fedora:Marketing_meetings#IRC_meetings_archives.

List 1 or 2 big decisions or high-level points (jokes are ok!) that happened during the meeting, to get people to read the minutes and logs.

Copy-paste the text version of the meeting minutes (meeting-bot-generated) here.

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