[Koha] Semi-automatic minutes for IRC meetings on #koha

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

At Chris Cormack's suggestion, I have added the MeetBot [2] plugin to
munin's bag of tricks.  MeetBot is a tool to help run IRC meetings
and, more importantly, produce a summary of the discussion, including
action items, automatically.

Here's a brief list of the important commands.

Commands for the chair:

#startmeeting - Start a meeting. Whoever starts the meeting is
designated the owner (and have permanent chair powers).
#chair - Add somebody to the list of chairs
#endmeeting - End the meeting.
#topic - Set a new topic.
#agreed - Document an agreement in the minutes.

Commands for Everyone:

#info - Add an info item to the minutes. People should liberally use
this for important things they say, so that they can be logged in the
minutes.
#action - Document an action item in the minutes. Include any
nicknames in the line, and the item will be assigned to them.
(nicknames are case-sensitive)
#idea - Add an idea to the minutes.
#help - Add a "Call for Help" to the minutes. Use this command when
you need to recruit someone to do a task. (Counter-intuitively, this
doesn't provide help on the bot)
#link - Add a link to the meeting minutes. The link should be the
first non-command on the line, other commentary after the link is OK.
Links beginning with http:// and a few other protocols are
automatically detected.

There is a manual [2] for MeetBot available which includes a tutorial
and a reference to its full set of commands.

For an example of the summary generated by the bot, please check out:

http://librarypolice.com/koha-meetings/2010/koha.2010-11-14-19.41.html

The full log corresponding to this meeting is:

 http://librarypolice.com/koha-meetings/2010/koha.2010-11-14-19.41.log.html

If anybody wants to hold a fake (or even a real) meeting to try it
out, I'll be around to help.  I propose that we try MeetBot for the
next general IRC meeting; if we like the results, we can adopt it.

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot
[2] http://meetbot.debian.net/Manual.html

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
gmcharlt at gmail.com