Let’s reduce (but not prohibit) meeting time spent on agenda-building. Let’s prepare topics in advance.
If we post topics in Discourse, we could potentially deal with them in non-real time and not need to bring up in meetings. But any unresolved topics could be brought up at meetings with simple reference to the topic post.
While we could put notes directly into meeting etherpads (currently https://snowdrift.sylphs.net:8002/p/meeting for main meeting and similar for teams, e.g. /outreach-circle-meeting), we could also start pre-meeting topics here and add notes to them. Or we could just link from a meeting post to the etherpad…
Agenda-building takes a minute or two at most; I don’t think it’s worth optimizing. I’d rather focus on better use of discussion time.
+1 to this approach. It’s hard for me to have a well thought-out opinion on a topic I was just introduced to (especially if I’m taking notes). I’d rather start the discussions on Discourse, then move to a meeting if we’re having trouble resolving it (Crowdmatching dollar amounts inaccurate - #17 by msiep is probably a good candidate for this).
- To continue a discussion from Discourse, I think putting a link in the meeting etherpad works fine, no need to complicate things.
- The link is mostly for documentation, since everyone is already up to date on the discussion from reading the thread.
The other thing meetings are better for is drawing attention; voice is just better than text for conveying importance. This could be just a status update, or it could be a request for discussion — in a Discourse thread, not right away in the meeting.
- To draw people’s attention to a discussion, I would give a brief summary of the issue in the meeting, then continue async on Discourse.
- I suggest posting the Discourse thread before the meeting. This way, we can include the link in the meeting notes for anyone who didn’t attend (or needs a refresher).
@team ^^advice on bringing topics up at meetings
1 Appreciation