Comments on: How to run an effective meeting on IRC

By: Fred Richards

Fred Richards — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:54:40 +0000

Hey Donnie,

I’m flrichar in the #LJ channel on freenode. I think you’re right on target, even for meetings that don’t happen in IRC-space. I’m not a developer, but I am a sr network engineer for a consultant and ASP. Too many of our meetings are inefficient! Not only that, we like to have them on lunch, so it ends up being one person standing in front of everyone else, kinda barking, while everyone else is eating.

For the engineering types obsessed with efficiency, this kinda stuff drives me crazy. Some of the best meetings we’ve ever had consisted of the following:

- everone contributed
- everyone /stood up/ (ie was not seated)
- everyone had a clear idea of what they were bringing to the table and their roles and responsiblities

Plenty of these were “lightning meetings” that happened very quickly, but were extremely efficient.

By: Donnie Berkholz

Donnie Berkholz — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:16:37 +0000

Ciaran,
That’s definitely a larger issue — however well a meeting goes, if everything the group met about is unimportant, it doesn’t have a big impact. Within Gentoo, that may mean that we need a way to decide whether topics are important enough to talk about during a council meeting instead of just adding everything brought up by everyone.

By: Donnie Berkholz

Donnie Berkholz — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:50:53 +0000

Bo (zlin),
You raised an interesting point — it hadn’t occurred to me that other people might be waiting for me to take notes, because I don’t spend any additional time writing them. My interpretation was that other people weren’t paying enough attention to that IRC channel because it’s either the middle of the workday for Americans or late night for much of Europe.

By: Donnie Berkholz

Donnie Berkholz — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:15:22 +0000

Bryan,
Thanks for chipping in. As I mentioned, I’ve learned much of the above from watching the council (including me) fail to do it consistently. What I’ve noticed is that in the meetings where we do successfully do some of the above steps, things move a lot more smoothly. There hasn’t yet been a meeting where all of the council members have done all of the steps.

By: Selena Deckelmann

Selena Deckelmann — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:43:48 +0000

Great summary!

Stuff I’d add / refine:

* Unresolved topics go into a “bin list” that is reviewed at the end of the meeting for next actions, discarding, or postponement to next meeting. Tell people their idea or issue went on to the bin list to help the group move on.
* Use a collaborative document like Google Docs during the meeting (or insert your favorite multi-user collaborative editing environment here) – adding notes, putting things on the bin list, and letting everyone view (and – depending on the type of meeting, edit!) helps keep things on track. SubEthaEdit is a fun one. Would like to hear from others about what tools they use!
* Come up with a snappy phrase for letting people know they’re going off topic or maybe too mired in details that don’t matter at the moment – “rathole!” is a common one. Using the same phrase that everyone understands helps prevent having a meta-discussion about whether something is off-topic or not.

-selena

By: Josh Nichols

Josh Nichols — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:18:04 +0000

By: Daniel Chokola

Daniel Chokola — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:02:41 +0000

In XMMS2’s meetings, we have participants prepare a statement with TODO, BLOCKING, DISCUSS, and DONE fields. When the meeting starts, participants paste their statements and everyone is brought up-to-date on what everyone else is doing.
TODO represents what is to be done, DONE, what the participant has accomplished since last meeting, BLOCKING, what’s preventing TODO from being accomplished, and DISCUSS is anything the participant would like to discuss during the meeting. If the DISCUSS items are not already on the official agenda, they are usually discussed after the official agenda items are exhausted.
With this layout, XMMS2 developers are almost never duplicating each others’ work or submitting conflicting work.

By: zlin

zlin — Tue, 13 May 2008 10:54:29 +0000

Either the chairman should not be the secretary or he shouldn’t take notes until after the meeting. Way too frequently five minutes or more passes without anyone saying anything because you’re busy taking notes and apparently everyone else just waits… This combined with the lack of any non-controversial decisions having been made kind of brings me to the conclusion that none of the council members want to achieve anything… i.e. the council lacks any sign of visions…

By: Bryan Østergaard

Bryan Østergaard — Tue, 13 May 2008 10:38:33 +0000

Gentoo Council meetings are some of the most ineffective meetings I can think of. I’m sure you do all of the above and that your points are important but the council meetings still ends up consisting of several hours of talk and no decisions month after month.

I guess that’s due to having the wrong people on the council and dragging down every discussion with lots of irrelevant details or details that should already be obvious to council members and everything ending up in a lot of insecurity and being postponed to next meeting.

I have no idea how to fix that but it’s an important issue and I hope you’ll figure out how to fix it eventually.

By: Ciaran McCreesh

Ciaran McCreesh — Tue, 13 May 2008 10:29:38 +0000

Effective? But you never decide anything…