Next public IRC Board meeting

[Paul W. Frields]

I'm a big fan of having some of the Board meetings on IRC regularly,
for better transparency and community engagement.  And I also think
having the community Q&A section up front is helpful so that community
members aren't held up by other agenda items.  Previously the Board
tried a fully open meeting with no enforced protocol to do this.  That
meeting ended up being confusing and hard to track, with multiple
overlapping conversations.

That's not a problem when everyone in the meeting has separate
concerns that can all be handled individually by different people --
after all, we do it every day in other IRC channels.  However, it's
not as effective in the setting of a group meeting whose purpose is to
explore issues, achieve consensus, and make decisions.  Clarity is
just as important in the open Q&A portion so the Board members'
positions are clear to the people asking questions, and the community
at large.  Therefore, I suggest the Board consider having some sort of
orderly process for taking questions.

The Board agreed publicly that if needed, the level of order in the
IRC meetings could be increased incrementally to make them more
effective.  Here is how I'd propose to escalate that level, one
meeting at a time, stopping when things seem to work OK:

1. Avoid using VOICE, and employ a self-regulated meeting protocol
   like our Ambassadors do in their regional meetings (!/?/eof/+1):
   https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/IRCHowTo#Protocol

2. Bring in a non-Board moderator to facilitate the above process,
   through gentle reminders to participants.

3. Have the non-Board moderator employ VOICE to facilitate the
   meeting.

Thoughts?

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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