Create a Meetings Guidelines Doc

[geekygirldawn]

We should provide a guidance document with lessons learned, best practices, tradeoffs, and other things to think about when scheduling community meetings for CNCF projects.

Notes from the March 1 Governance WG meeting about some Geo / timezone issues that a lot of projects are struggling with:

• With a global community, meetings for decision-making are problematic.
• You really need to make things more async, but people struggle with it.
• K8s contribEx do some Slack meetings, but it’s been hard and hasn’t worked well doing it in Slack.
• Is there any basic guidance we can give from the TAG?
• As we get more contributors from Asia, sync communication becomes problematic.
• Alternating meetings works for some communities, but not others
  • but folks need to be in both meetings and there needs to be some crossover for continuity
• If projects are using slack, they need paid/archive version
• Make use of github – issues, project boards (CI Signal K8s)
• Github is interested in new tools for projects
• Github discussions not recommended
• Things to replace about meetings:
  • TODO by meetings - meetings remind us to get work done to show progress.
  • Drop-in for folks trying to get attention
    • Replace with triage

[geekygirldawn]

FYI @thisisnotapril @jberkus

[carolynvs]

Karen and I have started working on this. Right now we are building up hopefully uncontroversial advice and I'm thinking that we'll want to interview some other maintainers and maybe shadow a few meetings across projects to make sure that we are just enshrining our own experiences.

[jberkus]

general tips:

• have an agenda at least 24 hours before the meeting. if folks see a calendar date with no agenda, they'll assume there's no meeting and not show
• do a call for agenda items 2 to 7 days before the meeting
• it's better if the agenda has fairly broad sharing permissions (example: anyone on your project dev list). Agenda defacing is rare; note-takers and contributors being locked out is common
• if you have a guest speaker/item owner for the meeting, confirm their attendance 1-on-1, 1-2 days before the meeting
• if you have new people in the meeting, do a general round of introductions, don't just ask the new people to intro themselves; it's important for the newbies to know everyone else
• someone needs to MC and keep an eye on the clock/agenda. that can't be the same person taking notes
• every meeting should have a note-taker; ask for volunteers at the start of the meeting (but beware of, and stop, anyone "assigning" non-male members to be the note-taker)
• don't be afraid to cut people off if you're behind schedule. Sometimes you need to say "that's an important topic, but we don't have time to cover it here. Can we take the discussion to [slack/GH issue/breakout meeting]?"

[jberkus]

More:

• look into automating meeting infra, such as auto-record when the meeting starts, and auto-upload (or live streaming) to public archives, even notes via auto-transcription. Anything that's automated is a thing you can't forget to do.
• sharing recordings of meetings online is important. for every contributor in the meeting, 2-3 contributors couldn't attend
• having good notes of the meeting is even more important than the recording