During TikiFest Ottawa, on 19 April 2013 Marc Laporte suggested that the Tiki developers community should look into holding all-online working sessions of developers, as some of the other open source developers communities do.
Holding monthly or quarterly meetings with all participants online was considered.
The main collaboration tool would be BigBlueButton which was already being used for monthly meetings. The main difference would be that, unlike monthly meetings, these online coding sessions would go on for 2 or more days. Goals would be similar to the goals of TikiFests, Tiki's traditional Face-to-face (f2f) meetings. Virtual presence would reduce travel time and costs.
In the past, meetings with a number of developers at a single location, with only a few others participating remotely was found not to work well. The belief is that things could work better with all participants were remote.
Learning how others do this
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) runs working group meetings using a combination of IRC and an online conferencing tool such as GoToMeeting to achieve this and some of the added tools they employed.
IRC, augmented by a number of bots, are used to record the minutes of the meetings.
Meeting are chaired by a rotating group of chairs. The Chair invite participants to serve as Scribe.
RRSAgent bot
Someone, usually the chair, invites the bot set, called "RRSAgent" to join the IRC session. As of that point, all text sent to the IRC channel ba any user is logged, except "/me" text (and text sent with logging explicitly turned off).
The bot understands a lot of useful commands from this point on, that contribute both to the essentials of meeting Minutes, as well as for project control. Some of these are listed below. for a complete list, and documentation of the RSSAgent bot, see the link below:
Meeting: <name>
Chair: <name>
Scribe: <name> as well as ScribeNick: <IRCnickname of scribe>
Agenda: <URI with webaddress of the agenda>
It also understand the following to allow people taking part to record themselves in the list of participants:
present+ <own IRCnickname>
Interspersed in scribed descriptions of who says what, participants may decide something needs active followup. The bot helps track actions:
ACTION: <text>
records an action and assigns it the next sequential number.
ACTION <number> = <newtext>
lets you replace the text of an action, while
ACTION- <number> removes Action-<number> from the list.
The keyword action is not case sensitive.
At various times during a meeting the command:
rrsagent, [please] create/draft/format/make/generate minutes.
This reformats a copy of the irc log into HTML-ized minutes.
Minutes are generally made available, in HTML format, with minimal cleanup within abour a half hour to hour following the end of each meeting, rarely as much as a half-day or day later, but definitely always much closer to the meeting they record, than to the next meeting (usally a week later, but during various stages of projects when 2 meetings a week take place).
Besides a number of other commands, the RRSAgent also has a very helpful command:
rrsagent, [please] help
For more details see: http://www.w3.org/2002/03/RRSAgent .
Tracker agent
A related tool, called the Tracker agent, helps W3C keep track of actions and isues.
- Actions have a title and a due date and are assigned to a single working group member.
- Issues have a title, a description and are related to a product. Issues can have only two states (OPEN and CLOSED).
The most important design goal, according to the link below, was "to be as simple as possible in order to let the Working Groups to concentrate on what they do best...". (highighting in the original)
For more on this see: http://www.w3.org/2005/06/tracker/features .
Unfortunately, the last section of this page answers the question "Can I get the code?" with "Tracker's code hasn't been released at this stage, as it relies on the specific schemas of W3C internal databases." followed by a bit of better news, "If you're interested in helping us put Tracker's code in better shape for public release, please get in tough with ..." and lists a name and w3c email address.
Given how tiki works with both its own trackers as well as with irc, we might have coders, documenters and developers who could either help as noted above, or develop something for tiki which does similar things, perhaps even in better ways.
How Actions and Issues can be reviewed and followed
Just as the RRSAgent, the tracker bot needs to be started (invited to take part in the meeting, on irc):
/invite trackbot #irc-chanelname
Once that's done, to list basic information about an ISSUE or an ACTION, simple type things like:
issue-50
trackerbot, ACTION-81?
To create an issue, simply say ISSUE: followed by a title text:
ISSUE: Regular expression support needs a test suite
trackerbot, issue: Review text for version 9
To create an ACTION, you basically just need to add the name of the person to whom it is being assigned:
action eileen: propose new language for pragma handling
ACTION: John to fix the types in test case comments
By default actions are due in one week. You may specify a different due date after the title, like this:
action: Alex to write a new section about color handling - due 15 June 2013
trackerbot, action sam: Update Web page history section - due in 1 month
The link above explains who you can use various common formats to specify date due
You can add notes to an ACTION or ISSUE:
note action-94: The Python documentation suggestion a couple of solutions
trackerbot, comment issue-67: Check how the widget WG solved their related problem
You can change the state of ISSUEs and ACTIONs by commands, such as:
close issue-41
reopen ACTION-65
trackerbot, action-56 closed
Likewise the date due can be changed for ACTIONs:
action-83 due 1 November 2013
trackerbot, action-33: due in 3 days
Associating ACTIONS, ISSUEs and products
associate ACTION-43 with ISSUE-15
trackerbot, link issue-45 to product-96
link product-6 and action-22