2010/9/6 Ryan Lane rlane32@gmail.com:
The chat in those channels isn't anything crucial or even related to development. If the channels go away, the talk that occurs there will simply move to private chats on IM. This being on IRC just makes it slightly easier to broadcast things to staff members. Do you really care to see chatter in the mediawiki channel like: "Free brownies in the break room.", "Water machine is getting fixed.", "Phone system is getting upgraded."? Should non-tech related employees be forced to deal with all the bot traffic, dev talk, and support talk of #mediawiki? Maybe it doesn't need to be private, but dealing with trolls gets old pretty fast.
There is also productive, work-related chat going on there, mostly someone working from home (a lot of of our staff have a habit of working from home one day a week) trying to grab someone else. Conversations where all participants work in tech frequently happen in other channels instead.
- Mute those who troll/are unwilling to stick to the agenda (they
will still be invited to listen)
I'm not completely sure that this is easy to do with our phone system, but maybe Skype or WebEx allow it.
- Post minutes as quickly as possible after the meeting is over
(hopefully within a couple of hours)
This should be trivial, as such meeting notes are usually (almost always for meetings I'm in) written collaboratively and on the fly in Etherpad, and publicly readable and editable to everyone who knows the URL (probably best to move stuff to the wikis anyway, though). We often posted the Etherpad link to our usability progress meeting notes in #wikipedia_usability , although to be fair that wasn't done with transparency or non-staff involvement in mind.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)