CommonScribe

What is it?

CommonScribe is software which converts the log of a chat session into a fairly-readable record of the meeting, assuming participants follow certain conventions during the meeting.

CommonScribe grows out of a long tradition at W3C of using an IRC channel during meetings. One key practice is that for each meeting, one person is selected as the "scribe" and has the duty of recording all important information. Because the scribe types on IRC, other participants can see their work as it happens, offering improvements as necessary. Afterwords, a tool such as CommonScribe is used to make the chat log easier to read.

Using CommonScribe

See the User's Guide.

To actually run it, use the control panel.

Compared to Scribe.perl

CommonScribe borrows heavily from the conventions of David Booth's Scribe.perl, but differs in a few key ways:

1. The original motivation was to allow people to edit the minutes on a Wiki. The first attempt (putting the output of scribe.perl on the wiki) did not allow people to fix problems like forgetting to identify the scribe. With CommonScribe, "scribe: ..." lines can be added/editted easily, during or after the meeting.
2. CommonScribe has a notion of people. Many attributes of a meeting and events during a meeting involve particular people. Where scribe.perl treats the names of people as opaque strings, CommonScribe treats the names as referents which must be resolved unambiguously. It is a scribe error (usually fixed after the meeting) to not identify people unambiguously.
3. With this in mind, CommonScribe has an object model which is amenable to data processing, such as querying for Resolutions or searching for all text attributed to one's self. No such interface is currently provided, however.
4. CommonScribe is post-tracker, so it does not attempt to record Action Items. Instead, it tries to stay out of tracker's way, and to link text like action-NN and issue-NN to the tracker page for the item.

Status

CommonScribe was developed as it was being used by the OWL Working Group. As of March 2009, the SPARQL Working Group has volunteered to be the second group of users.

See Also

• source code (python)

Bugs, Open Issues, Ideas

• TODO: add auto-attendance mode, so if you don't say who is present, the system just watches which names are used.
• TODO: allow name over-rides so when "john smith" and "john brown" are at the same meeting, the system can be configure to allow "john" to always resolve to "john smith" if the group wants this.
• TODO: add ajax interface to minutes, allowing them to be edited in place, rather than going back to wiki
• TODO: add database search functions, across minutes from many meetings