meetingology
Meetingology is a bot running on the #ubuntu-meeting channel and some other channels on the Freenode network. Its purpose is to facilitate meetings and take the minutes. The general principals are as follows:
- The bot should shut up, unless it has something useful to say, it won't echo every command in the channel, but it might confirm in a private message to the user that it understood things (this principal is not yet fully implemented)
- Writing minutes is an activity unworthy of a human, the post meeting minutes process should be copy-paste-done.
Some commands can be given only by the chair, or an op. these commands are marked like this line is. - It should be command compatible with the old Mootbot, it accepts [topic] and #topic as equivalents
- The full list of commands is:
- #accept #accepted #action #agree #agreed #chair #commands #endmeeting #endvote #halp #help #idea #info #link #lurk #meetingname #meetingtopic #nick #progress #rejected #replay #restrictlogs #save #startmeeting #subtopic #topic #unchair #undo #unlurk #vote #voters #votesrequired
- Some of these are more useful than others.
- Minutes consist of a summary of the important points, plus a full log of the meeting. #accept <text>
Adds a note to the minutes that a point was accepted
- #accepted
Alias of #accept
- #action <text with one or more nicks in it>
Records in the minutes that the nicks were assigned an action.
- #agree <text>
Records in the minutes that something was agreed upon, this might follow an informal discussion that did not merit a vote but a consensus was found.
- #agreed
Alias of #agree
- #chair <chair1> <chair2>
Make one or more people chairs of the meeting. There are some commands that can be given by anyone and some only by chairs (changing topic, calling a vote etc). Anyone who is a channel operator can act as a chair, but it is recommended that you op up, use the #chair command to designate the chair and then deop again.
#commands Lists the commands the bot understands. This is called by #startmeeting so there is no real need to use this command.
- #endmeeting
Close a running meeting, remember if the chair is gone any operator can use the #endmeeting command
- #endvote
Closes a running vote and declares the results. Called automatically by #endmeeting if a vote is not closed by the end of the meeting.
- #halp
Rather odd alias for #help. No idea why.
- #help <text>
This records in the minutes a call for help. It does not provide help on using the bot. You might use it like "#help we need people to staff a conference stand"
#idea <text>
Allows anyone to suggest an idea, which will be recorded in the minutes.
#info <text>
Allows anyone to provide information which will be in the summary minutes.
#link <url>
Allows anyone to provide a link. This is a bit of an unnecessary command as just pasting in a link will record it.
- #lurk
Don't use this, it makes the bot very quiet, it is for debugging the bot by having it shadow another running meeting bot.
- #meetingname <text>
Don't use this, it sets the meeting name, but it is more useful to set the meeting topic
- #meetingtopic <text>
This sets the overall topic for the meeting, you don't need to use this as you can do "#startmeeting topic" but if you forget to do it on the #startmeeting line you can do it with this command.
- #nick <nick>
This recognises a nick that has not spoken. If you want to give someone an action who is not present in the meeting you can use this command so it knows that word is a person name when it parses the action string.
- #progress <text>
This is an alias for #subtopic, generally used for reporting progress on action items. You would have a "#topic Review of action items from previous minutes" then in that topic do a "#progress first action" etc.
- #rejected <text>
Like #accepted, but not.
- #replay
Don't use this
- #restrictlogs
Untested functionality to chmod the log files, a bit pointless for our meetings in publicly logged channels.
- #save
Causes certain types of minutes to flush to disk. You don't need to use this, it will do it on #endmeeting.
#startmeeting <meetingname>
This will kick off a new meeting and set the meeting topic, e.g. #startmeeting Community Council
- #subtopic <text>
This marks a subtopic in the meeting, it won't update the channel topic. A bit like #topic, but less so.
- #topic <text>
Moves the meeting on to a new topic. It will update the IRC channel /topic if it can with the original topic, the meeting name and the new topic.
#unchair #undo #unlurk #vote #voters #votesrequired