[Gendispatch] Re: New draft: draft-rescorla-auto-minutes-00

[Ted Hardie <[e-mail]>]

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the draft, and for the reminder of the wonderful "Yes, Minister"
quote on minutes.

I have used the transcripts or recordings to produce minutes in the past.
As a source, they are very useful.  But that experience makes me believe
that we are very unlikely to see the transcripts simply approved as
minutes.  Part of that is because our community makes very heavy use of
acronyms and initialisms, which are often poorly transcribed.  Part of it
is because we have folks from a wide variety of backgrounds who speak with
a fairly varied set of accents.  Automated transcription is getting better,
but it still struggles with some voices.  I believe the chairs may have to
look specifically for both issues and act to adjust the transcripts on a
regular basis.  As a concrete change,  I suggest adjusting this text:

OLD
After the conclusion of the meeting, automatically retrieve the transcript
and make it available to the chairs as candidate minutes. Chairs can either
approve the minutes, correct or annotate them as they see fit, and publish
them.

to

NEW
After the conclusion of the meeting, automatically retrieve the transcript
and make it available to the chairs as candidate minutes. Chairs must then
review the minutes for errors or omissions and then correct or annotate
them as they see fit.  The result is then published as a draft for working
group review.

I personally tend to believe that the action items and summaries of
decisions taken are very useful, so I would also suggest adding:

"Where a working group has assigned action items or taken tentative
decisions to be confirmed on the list, the annotations made by the chairs
should include these."

Thanks again,

Ted

On Tue, Oct 7, 2025 at 9:39 AM Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Aargh:
> https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-rescorla-auto-minutes-00.html
>
> -Ekr
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 7, 2025 at 1:33 AM Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Greetings fellow gendispatchers,
>>
>> Have you ever taken minutes for a WG? Have you ever been the chair
>> desperately begging for someone to take minutes? Have you ever been
>> the person sitting in the front row refusing to look the chair in the
>> eye while they desperately tried to get someone to take minutes? It
>> doesn't have to be that way.
>>
>> For the past several years we have routinely made audio and video
>> recordings of WG sessions, which also include transcriptions, thus
>> providing a record of what happened in each WG session, and avoiding
>> the need for manual transcription. To that end, my co-authors and I
>> have published the following draft:
>>
>> https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/di.html
>>
>> This draft recognizes the practice of using the automated transcript
>> as a starting point for the minutes (with the chairs having the final
>> approval, of course), and asks the IETF LLC to make a few small
>> changes to the tools to facilitate that practice.
>>
>> -Ekr
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
> Gendispatch mailing list -- [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe send an email to [e-mail]
>