It is essential that someone keep a log of the chat session. The easiest way to do this (for W3C IRC sessions) is to issue these IRC commands:
/invite rrsagent rrsagent, make records public
Failing this, many chat clients keep their own logs which can be converted into a suitable format.
In general, CommonScribe pays attention to lines of the form "word: some text", and requires that the word either be a CommonScribe command or name a meeting participant. There are a few exceptions, though.
| Scribe Activity | IRC syntax | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Declare who is scribing | Scribe: <your name> | Scribe: alanr |
| Recording what someone says | <name>: <text of what they said> | Sandro: I don't think that's a good idea |
| Shortcut for more from the same speaker | ... <additional text> | ... because it will never work |
| Correcting mistakes | s/<old text>/<new text>/ | s/it will/it would/ |
| Setting topic for part of meeting | Topic: <title of new topic> | Topic: How to Scribe Effectively
(If Zakim is used to manage the agenda, and is reporting lines like "agendum 7. How to Chair Effectively", CommonScribe treats those lines as if they were Topic: lines.) |
| Setting a sub-topic for part of meeting | subtopic: <title of new sub-topic> | subtopic: Learning What Is Worth Writing Down |
| Record proposals
(some chairs prefer to do this themselves) | PROPOSED: <proposal text> | PROPOSED: Our June meeting will be in San Francisco. |
| Resolutions (after voting; some chairs prefer to do this themselves) | RESOLVED: <proposal text reiterated> | RESOLVED: Our June meeting will be in San Francisco. |
Use the control panel. Select your group, edit the date if necessary, and click "Copy IRC Log". You may want to do this at the start of the meeting, and again at times during the meeting. It's okay to start to clean up any chatlog text on the wiki as soon as it's copied there. (Clicking "Copy IRC Log" again later will only insert the new lines; it will not overwrite the old ones.)
Preview the formatted minutes by clicking on the "preview nicely formatted version" link. If there are any "scribe errors" or places where the minutes should be improved, go back and edit the chatlog on the wiki, making your improvements.
You may want to put a line like this near the top of your chatlog like this:
<betty> present: betty, joe, jim, mary_smith, mary_jones
You can get a first approximation of that list of people by using the "Seen" line at the top of the formatting minutes, which is the list of everyone who said something on IRC or who the scribe mentioned. See People and Names for more details.
When you're satisfied with the results, use the "Save" button on the preview page, then send e-mail to the group, giving the URL of the saved minutes.
Use these scribe commands as necessary to improve the output.
| Scribe Activity | IRC syntax | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Provide a summary of the current (sub)topic (often added after-the-fact) | summary: <text of summary> | summary: Four proposals were considered, but none had consensus |
| Setting Sub-Sub-Topic | Subsubtopic: <title of new sub-sub-topic> | subsubtopic: Importance of good desert menu |
| Recording Attendance | Present: <list of people who are present> | present: sandro, ian, evan, bijan |
| Recording Remote Attendance (for F2F meetings) | Remote: <list of people attending remotely> | remote: dave, deborah |
| Recording Guests (one person per line) | Guest: <firstname> (<nickname>) <lastname>, <affiliation> | guest: Manu Sporny guest: Tim (timbl) Berners-Lee, W3C |
| Recording Regrets | Regrets: <list of people unable to attend> | regrets: frank, jim |
| Recording Chair | Chair: <list of people chairing the meeting> | chair: Ian |
Some useful tips and tricks:
In the chatlog, a nameref is a one-word name for a person. It is often their first name or a nickname, and it must match exactly one person.
When matching names, CommonScribe uses different lists of people, depending on the context. It uses the group-participants list (typically maintained on a wiki page or in a W3C database) for the attendance commands and for recognizing the author of a chat message, but for other commands it first tries to use the list of current-attendees.
If attendance is taken at a meeting (that is, if the PRESENT command is used at some point during the meeting), then matching stops there. Otherwise, when a nameref does not match any of the current-attendees, the list of group-participants is also searched. If a match is found there, it is used, and the person is deemed to be present. This builds an implicit attendance list of everyone who sends a chat message or is mentioned in a scribe command, which may be sufficient for some groups, obviating the need to take attendance.
The two stage name matching behavior is designed to allow convient namerefs whenever possible. A typical case is where the group has multiple people with the same first name. At meetings where only one of them is in attendance, that first name can be used unambiguously, after attendance is taken. If name matching becomes too confusing, people should just use unique nicknames.
Note that name matching first looks at the nicknames. If an exact match is found with a nickname, no more names are looked at, and the name is deemed unambiguous. This means if a group has two people named Ivan, if there is agreement that one will be called Ivan and the other called something else, a seemingly-redundant nickname of "Ivan" should be entered (see the "Users" link in your groups tracker instance) for the one who will be known as "Ivan".
If no nickname match is found, CommonScribe tries to match using a set of rules like: