MeetBot Guide

LF Project communities use MeetBot to take notes and to manage meetings on IRC.

To host a meeting, join #<project>-meeting on irc.libera.chat and take notes on the public IRC channel. It’s recommended that all meetings participants assist with the task of taking notes. This reduces the onus of the task on a single person since its difficult to take notes and act as the chair of the meeting at the same time.

MeetBot uploads the meeting minutes and raw IRC logs are to the LF IRC log server and are available under the directory IRC channel (e.g. for #<project>-meeting).

Start and end a meeting

  • To start a meeting, use a #startmeeting <Meeting name> command followed by meeting name.

  • Use #chair <username> to assign one or more meeting chairs.

    Meeting chairs have the ability to moderate the meeting and allows them to use commands such as #startmeeting, #endmeeting, #topic, #startvote, #endvote.

  • Use #endmeeting to end the meeting.

    This frees up MeetBot to run other meetings in the channel and posts the links to the HTML and raw minutes to the channel.

Take notes

  • Use #topic to set a discussion topic.

    This command automatically changes the topic and closes the previous discussion item.

    #topic Review Action Items

    Note

    The chair of the meeting has to set the topic.

  • Use #info to record a note.

    #info dneary suggested using MeetBot for meeting minutes

  • Use #agree <agreement> to record agreements to document consensus.

    #agreed promote the user X as committer on project Y

    Note

    The chair of the meeting has to record agreements.

  • Use #link to link to external resources in the minutes.

    #link http://wiki.opnfv.org/wiki/MeetBot

  • Use #action to record action items.

    This creates a summary section at the end of the meeting, summarizing the action items by assignee. Include the user names in the action to mark an assignee to a action item.

  • Use #startvote <vote> and #endvote to start/end voting.

    #startvote Do you approve a 15 minute coffee break? (+1, 0, -1)

    Voters will use #vote <option> to vote. Typically +1 is for approval, 0 abstain, and -1 non-approval.

  • Use #undo to remove the last addition to the minutes.

    This command undoes the last command in the stack. (eg. #idea, #info, #action, #topic, etc…)

Post-meeting work

After the meeting, update the wiki page with the link to the HTML minutes summary along with the date, and send an email to the project mailing list. Cut and paste the output in-channel of MeetBot in the email and send the minutes email to the project mailing list.

Example minutes and logs from OPNFV Test and Performance team, who met at 15:00 UTC on Thursday Jan 15, 2015: