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 |
| Setting a sub-topic for part of meeting | subtopic: <title of new sub-topic> | subtopic: Learning What Is Worth Writing Down |
| Record proposals (sometimes this is done by chair, or others) | PROPOSED: <proposal text> | PROPOSED: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. |
| Resolutions (after voting) | RESOLVED: <proposal text reiterated> | RESOLVED: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. |
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.)
Put a line like this near the top of your chatlog:
<betty> present: betty, joe, jim, mary_smith, mary_jones
In addition to showing who was at the meeting, this line tells CommonScribe which names to match against in disambiguating names.
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.
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 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) 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.