Hosting an IRC meeting SOP

Introduction

This is an Ambassadors SOP that describes how to Host an Ambassadors meeting on IRC in a way that it becomes productive and gets people involved with Fedora.

Meetings are crucial procedures within Ambassadors and you can have different types of them. Global ones, Regional ones, Country-specific or FAmSCo meetings.

Most of the information outlined in this SOP applies on Meetings of various other sub-projects of Fedora.

Examples

You can see examples of past Meeting successfully run at FAmSCo meeting of January 22, 2011.

Instructions

Step 0 : First time set up

If you have never had this meeting before and you intend to do so regularly then you should do the following :

1. Announce it to the target audience (e.g. through mailing list)
2. Pick a time slot (according to feedback) and make the appropriate edits to Meeting channel page. Remember you can use #fedora-meeting-2 or 3 too.
3. Announce the meeting in formal way at the Ambassadors mailing list

If your meeting is regional then do the appropriate changes in Ambassadors meetings page.

Step 1 : Have an agenda

Please remember!
Never spend the time of the people attending the meeting, always publish extensive information of the issues to discuss beforehand

Use the preferred communication tool of the project/group you are attending, if it has one yet.

In order to have an agenda you may use one of the following :

1. Single wiki pages (e.g. FAmSCo uses FAmSCo agenda in this wiki)
2. Wiki pages per meeting (e.g. EMEA Ambassadors use Meeting:EMEA_Ambassadors_<date> as their naming convention)
3. Use an external ticketing system (e.g. LATAM Ambassadors use their own Redmine instance)
4. Use your teams mailing list (last resort)

Step 2 : Send reminders

Let people know when you are having the meeting by sending a reminder on the appropriate mailing list based on Ambassadors meetings reminders

Step 3 : Use Zodbot

Learn to use Zodbot, and use its commands wisely to get informative meetign minutes.

Do that so people that people attended the meeting can look back on it, or so as to keep up to date people that didn't attend the meeting.

Step 4 : Publish the minutes

Send the minutes of the meeting to the mailing list of your team, identi.ca group or publish them in a blog, immediately after ending the meeting. This is a *must*, as this is how we keep track of our meetings and action items.

Step 5 : Update the wiki

Update the wiki page of your team, editing the entry of the meeting just finished, marking them as done, and including the links to the minutes and full logs.

This can be done by either editing the specific meeting page, or by editing the legacy meetings page (if applicable)

Following Steps

Follow up the actions and agreements you have gotten in the meeting. Inform the people interested in those actions items and if you are going to delegate tasks, remember you can't delegate the responsibility of getting the agreements respected and tasks done.

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