New to IRC?

See the Communication for help getting started with IRC.

Meeting Tips

designate a specific minute taker for each meeting, either by volunteer or by picking round-robin from a set of adept minute takers
be patient with new minute takers
establish and use a speaker queue process; this is key to ensuring equitable floor time, which is itself key to collaborative discussions. W3C's IRC bot uses the "q+ / q-" command to allow users to add/remove themselves from the speaker queue.
the minute taker can pause the meeting at any time to ensure that a point to be minuted is captured correctly
the minute-taker should include the name/handle of each speaker (precede their comment). If the speaker is unknown to the minute-taker, the minute-taker should use a form such as "aaa:", "bbb:" (different each time) to indicate that they do not recognize the speaker. That way some other attendee (even the speaker themselves) can use the "s/aaa/bob" command to correct the speaker name for the minutes.
with new speakers, or for the sake of new minute takers, the speaker should introduce themselves ("this is bob") so the minute-taker can associate their voice
where possible, type the points you intend to make before you make them, and enter them as you speak. that will help the minute-taker.
try always to speak slowly, and keep your points concise and clear, so the minute taker can keep up.
background discussions are OK but should be on-topic and not distract from the discussion.
many points can be made solely by entering them in the IRC channel. the chair should be watching for such comments and other requests for assistance etc

Creating Meeting Minutes with MeetBot

The Acumos project uses MeetBot to create and manage meeting minutes on IRC.

When hosting a meeting, please join #acumos-meeting on irc.freenode.org and take notes in the public IRC channel. Please recommend to other attendees that they join, to spread the load of note taking - it is very difficult to take notes and chair a meeting at the same time.

Meeting minutes and raw IRC logs are saved at the LF IRC log server under the IRC channel name (e.g. for acumos-meeting).

The full guide to MeetBot syntax is here.

Beginning and ending a meeting

#startmeeting <name> Starts a meeting. At the start of a meeting, issue a #startmeeting command followed by meeting name to tell the robot the meeting has begun.
#chair bryan_att Adds a co-chair. The IRC handle of the person who starts the meeting is initially the only person who can set topics, agree on actions and end the meeting. Add other people to enable multiple people to manage the meeting.
#endmeeting Ends the meeting. Ending the meeting frees MeetBot up for other meetings, and posts the links to the HTML and raw minutes in the IRC channel.

Taking notes

#topic Review action items: Start by setting a topic. A new #topic automatically changes the topic and closes the previous item
#info dneary suggested using MeetBot for meeting minutes: #info is the most basic MeetBot command, recording a note
#link http://wiki.acumos.org: a #link command will include a link to an external resource in minutes
#agreed Acumos will be written in COBOL: Record agreements to document consensus
#action aimeeu to port the Linux kernel to COBOL before next week's meeting: Recording action items creates a summary section at the end of minutes
#startvote do you approve a 15 minute coffee break? (+1, 0, -1): command to start voting
#vote +1: approval vote (0 for abstain and 1 for non-approval)
#endvote command to end voting
#undo Mistakes happen, sometimes multiple people minute the same thing, or record a comment on the wrong topic. #undo removes the last addition to the minutes (#idea, #info, #action, #topic, etc.) from the stack

After the meeting

When your meeting is finished, add a link to the HTML minutes summary to the project wiki page. Below is an example:

The Acumos Documentation met at 11 AM PDT on Thursday, 5 April 2018 . Here are the minutes:

 Minutes:        http://ircbot.wl.linuxfoundation.org/meetings/acumos-meeting/2018/acumos-meeting.2018-03-27-15.56.html
 Minutes (text): http://ircbot.wl.linuxfoundation.org/meetings/acumos-meeting/2018/acumos-meeting.2018-03-27-15.56.txt
 Log:            http://ircbot.wl.linuxfoundation.org/meetings/acumos-meeting/2018/acumos-meeting.2018-03-27-15.56.log.html

Previous minutes are collected on the [insert your previous minutes] wiki page.