Linaro Meeting Bot

Introduction

linarobot is using MeetBot, a limnoria plugin for IRC meeting notetaking. Minutes are published to a public URL given at the end of each meeting under meeting-logs/. This allows you to better communicate with your project or groups after the IRC meeting, as well as keep the meeting more under control and on-topic.

Logging

See http://irclogs.linaro.org/ for the available IRC logs. There are also logs for the private channels and these are available under https://irclogs.linaro.org/restricted.

Commands

All commands are case-insensitive, and use the # prefix character.


Not all commands have output. This might be confusing, because you don't know if it's been acted on or not. However, this is a conscious design decision to try to keep out of the way and not distract from the real people. If something goes wrong, you can adjust and have MeetBot re-process the logs later. 


Bold commands are the main important ones - knowing just them is enough to run a great meeting.

For Chairs only:

  • #startmeeting - Starts a meeting. The calling nick becomes the chair. If any text is given on the rest of the line, this becomes the meeting topic.

  • #endmeeting - End a meeting, save logs, restore previous topic, give links to logs. You know the drill.

  • #topic - Set the current topic of discussion. The IRC Bot changes the topic in the channel (saving the original topic to be restored at the end of the meeting).

  • #agreed - Mark something as agreed on. The rest of the line is the details.

  • #chair - Add new chairs to the meeting. The rest of the line is a list of nicks, separated by commas and/or spaces. The nick which started the meeting is the owner and can't be de-chaired. The command replies with a list of the current chairs, for verification (Chairs only.)

For everyone:

  • #info - Add an INFO item to the minutes.

  • #action - Add an ACTION item to the minutes. Provide irc nicks of people involved, and will be both a complete listing of action items, and a listing of action items sorted by nick at the end of the meeting. This is very useful for making sure this gets done.

  • #idea - Add an IDEA to the minutes.

  • #help - Add a HELP item to the minutes. Use this command when you need to recruit someone to do a task.

  • #link - Add a link to the minutes. The URL must be the first thing on the line, separated by a space from the rest of the line, and it will be properly hyperlinked. This command is automatically detected if the line starts with http:, https:, mailto:, and some other common protocols.

More commands are documented in the manual.

Features

  • All in python.
  • Multiple Chairs.
  • Posts direct links when done.
  • Stores and restores topic. 
  • Sets topic in the channel.
  • Can restrict permissions on published logs.
  • Counts lines spoken by attendees.
  • Tabulates action items by assigned person, including unassigned items.
  • Flexible command definitions, simply add another method.
  • Can replay logged meetings and re-generate the minutes from that.
  • Can run meetings on multiple channels and servers concurrently.
  • Pingall command. linarobot: pingall <ping message>.

  • Configurable timezone.
  • Configurable via meetingLocalConfig.py file.

  • admin supybot commands (addchair, deletemeeting).
  • Switch to a persistent cache: that won't be erased on reload.
  • %(meetingname)s configuration