Wiki-Bitner: /* Details */

2006-08-03T21:00:50Z

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Wiki-Bitner: /* Details */

2006-08-03T20:58:26Z

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Wiki-Mpg: brainstorming about a meeting bot

2006-08-03T19:42:43Z

brainstorming about a meeting bot

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=== Introduction ===

Successful meetings involve some overhead: creating agendas, assigning action items, producing minutes for later review, etc -- but no one really relishes having to be "the scribe" and write up minutes and whatnot. Since most of our meetings occur via IRC (or IRC + phone), however, it seems like we ought to be able to pretty easily have an agent running in the background, monitoring the IRC conversation, to serve as a "recording secretary" or "administrative assistant" for these sorts of tasks.

I envision a "meeting bot", which can do these basic functions:
* record the IRC transcript of the meeting
* record who attended the meeting
* record assigned tasks
* record notes about agenda items discussed
* automatically generate minutes

It would be nice if the bot could walk us through each item on the agenda, but I don't have a clear notion of the user interface for that yet (would require the agenda be in some XML-like form somewhere...) It would also really be nice if such a bot could also serve as an interface to an issue tracking system. But until OSGeo has a baseline issue tracking system, we oughtn't go there.

=== Prior art ===

I'm not an IRC expert and I've never written a bot, but it seems like a fun thing to do (and that is all that this really all about...).

A quick surf of the net found a few things by the WC3 folks close to what I'm thinking of:
* [http://www.w3.org/2001/12/zakim-irc-bot.html Zakim]
* [http://www.w3.org/2002/03/RRSAgent RRSAgent]
* [http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2002/scribe/scribedoc.htm Scribe.perl]

I need to research these to see if those things are what I want. Although the above are all Perl, and I'd prefer Python (a la [http://supybot.com/ supybot]?).

=== Details ===

'''Operation'''

* lives on the #osgeo channel, 24x7
* restarts itself automatically
* keeps a file-based backing store, in case the bot goes down

'''Required Features'''

(this is not the exact syntax, just a rough idea)

* general command: "bot: start the meeting named VisCom"
** starts recording the full IRC transcript of the meeting
** records list of attendees, based on who spoke
** watches for specific keyword-based commands (below)

* general command: "bot: end meeting"
** stops recording transcript
** minutes automatically generated, put somewhere or mailed out
** emails out list of specific tasks to specific owners

* keyword-based commands (detected by the bot, while a meeting is active; might be preferable to prefacing everything by "''bot:'''")
** "add attendee Alice" - extends attendee list, e.g. if Alice only on phone
** "TODO Bob order new shirts" - records a task for Bob in the minutes
** "NOTE shirts are $15/each" - adds a note to capture in the minutes
** "show attendees|tasks|minutes" - dumps current status of things

'''Optional Features'''

* "bot: add meeting VisCom <date> <time>"
** bot keeps list of coming meetings
** bot can send reminder 10 mins before meeting

* "add agenda item ask about getting more shirts"
* "list all agenda items"
* "start next agenda item"

← Older revision		Revision as of 21:00, 3 August 2006
Line 64:		Line 64:
	* "bot: show next meeting" -- shows when the next osgeo meeting is		* "bot: show next meeting" -- shows when the next osgeo meeting is
	* "bot: show next geodata meeting" -- shows when the next geodata meeting is		* "bot: show next geodata meeting" -- shows when the next geodata meeting is
		+	* "bot: start vote" -- records +1, 0, -1 and nicks of folks who voted

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:58, 3 August 2006
Line 62:		Line 62:
	* "list all agenda items"		* "list all agenda items"
	* "start next agenda item"		* "start next agenda item"
		+	* "bot: show next meeting" -- shows when the next osgeo meeting is
		+	* "bot: show next geodata meeting" -- shows when the next geodata meeting is

MeetingBot - Revision history

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Wiki-Mpg: brainstorming about a meeting bot