Telephone Conferences

How Do I Attend a Call?

We use UberConference and IRC for our conference calls. You can dial in by browsing to https://www.uberconference.com/hydra-cg. Please also connect your IRC client to irc://irc.w3.org:6665/#hydra or use W3C's web IRC. IRC is used to manage the speaker queue, scribe, share links etc.

The dates and times of the calls as well as the agenda can be found on the conference calls page in our wiki. Feel free to add items to the agenda that you'd like to discuss.

After you connected and the call started ask Zakim, our IRC meeting bot, to put you on the speaker queue:


                zakim, queue+

You can see who's on the queue with


                zakim, queue?

If you want to remove yourself from the queue again, just write


                zakim, queue-

How Do I Run a Call and Scribe?

We use a few bots to run our conference calls. Please invite them before the conference call starts by issuing the following commands in IRC:


                /invite RRSAgent #hydra

                /invite Zakim #hydra

After the bots joined the IRC channel, you start the meeting and tell the bots what it is about
(plus points for deep linking the right agenda):


                trackbot, start meeting

                

                Zakim, this is https://www.uberconference.com/hydra-cg

                

                Meeting: Hydra W3C Community Group Conference Call

                Chair: Markus Lanthaler

                Agenda: https://www.w3.org/community/hydra/wiki/Conference_Calls#Agenda

As people join the call, they should mark their presence (you can also do it on their behalf) using the following command — inserting their user name and removing the angle brackets:


                present+ <IRC user name>

The last thing before starting the call is to elect a scribe (either a volunteer or by picking the person that hasn't scribed the longest) and document who it is with the following command:


                Scribe: <IRC user name>

After this, the chair moderates the call. He will signal the start of a new topic on IRC with


                Topic: <Title of the topic that is being discussed>

The scribe then transcribes what has been said by typing the user name of the person speaking followed by a colon and the statement such as in the example below:


                markus: I like this approach

Literal transcription is not necessary but usually simpler than trying to summarize someone else's thoughts on the fly. A statement can be split into multiple lines. Please proceed continuations with three dots such as in


                markus: I like this approach

                ... it is much clearer than the previous ones

                ... and solves the problem completely

If the scribe speaks, someone else can — and should — take over and scribe the statement in exactly the same way.

Action items, proposals and resolutions can be recorded as follows:


                ACTION: <Markus to clean up meeting notes>

                PROPOSAL: <Make Hydra more generic by introducing...>

                RESOLVED: <Make Hydra more generic by introducing...>

At the end of the meeting you can request RRSAgent to publish the meeting notes (this is for W3C; we store them on GitHub) and ask RRSAgent and Zakim to leave the channel:


                rrsagent, please publish the minutes

                rrsagent, please make these logs world-visible

                

                rrsagent, bye

                zakim, bye

After the call, please spend a few minutes to clean up the minutes, convert them to HTML and create a pull request to upload them to GitHub:

Create a new folder using the date of the conference call in the format yyyy-mm-dd.
Create a file irc.log containing the IRC log of the conference call.
Open scribetool and paste the IRC log in to the text field at the bottom of the screen.
Spend two minutes to check the nicely formatted minutes.
- Are all the fields at the top such as the agenda, the scribe and the participants populated correctly?
- Is every statement attributed to the right person (it sometimes happens that you forget the three dots for a continuation)?
- Are all action items, proposals and resolutions marked up correctly?
Switch to HTML mode by clicking the "Show HTML" button on the right and copy the result into a file called index.html. Please do not manually edit the HTML code in any way as it might break automated processing of those files!
Create a pull request to add the folder containing the two files to HydraCG/Minutes on GitHub and give owners permissions to add files to your pull request (this will be used to add the audio recording).

Finally, please record attendance in our wiki and send the meeting minutes to public-hydra@w3.org. You can use scribetool's text output.