Dear All, Below is my "plan" for improving the organisation of future RIPE meetings, which I hope will benefit everybody. Please read ! Thanks and best wishes, Anne -------------------------------------------------------------- Proposal to simplify minute taking at future RIPE meetings May 27th 1993 Anne Lord Four years ago the first RIPE meeting was held. At that meeting there were 14 participants and 9 agenda items. The meeting lasted one day. Since that meeting the size of RIPE meetings has continued to increase at every meeting. At the most recent meeting held at the end of April 1993, there were 65 participants and 18 agenda items (and one agenda item comprised 8 reports from different RIPE working groups). The meetings currently span 3 days. Whilst the rate of growth of the meetings has slowed down, the overall numbers still continue to increase. Clearly the task of maintaining the quality and timliness of the minutes as well as paying attention to the amount of paper generated has concomitantly become more difficult. My suggestions for improving the minutes follow below. 1. Presentations The presentations scheduled on the agenda generate the most paper. In previous versions of minutes, the full text of a presentation has been incorporated into the minutes. For this reason, all those persons scheduled on the agenda to give a presentation will be asked to submit, in electronic form, a SUMMARY of their presentation. The material submitted will be used directly in the minutes. The only editing carried out will be grammar and spelling checks. The deadline for submission will be the first day of the RIPE meeting. After which if nothing is received then there will be no substantive text incorporated into the minutes. Benefits: o There are three obvious benefits from this. Firstly the presenters themselves can decide what is important and necessary to be recorded in the minutes. o Following from this, it is likely that less paper will be used to summarise the presentation than was used for the actual presentation. o Finally, the minutes taker of the RIPE meeting can concentrate on noting the salient points of the question and answer sessions which follow the presentation. There is now a presentations directory in the RIPE document store (see Quarterly Report Doc id: ripe-87 for details). All those who would like to make their presentations publically available are invited to send them to <meeting@ripe.net> to be stored. This can also be done prior to the meeting. 2. Working Group Meetings On the second day of the meeting, each working group chairperson will receive an envelope containing a number of OHP slides, mark up pens, a reminder sheet and a working group attendee sign up sheet. The reminder sheet will remind the chairperson to : o ensure that there is someone taking the minutes at the meeting of their working group o ensure that the scribe submits the minutes before the deadline to the wg chairperson for them to edit and subsequently to mail electronically to <meeting@ripe.net>. There will be a deadline date for the submission of the minutes from the working group of 1 week after the meeting. The deadline will be tight and binding - if no report is received, then there will be no substantial text in the minutes covering the events of the wg meeting. Benefits: o the minute taker will relieve the load on those working group chairpersons who currently chair AND take the minutes, contributing towards a more focussed meeting. o the chairperson will have the editorial final say on the content of the working group minutes as the text received will only be checked for grammatical and spelling correctness and otherwise not edited in any way. Conclusion These are my draft plans for improving the timliness, quality and overall quantity of paper generated as "minutes" at future meetings. The ideas were drawn from analysing the most time consuming activities in compiling the minutes and how support to the working group chairs could be improved. On the former, a significant amount of time is spent analysing my notes for their technical accuracy. Having the summaries beforehand and the working group minutes mailed to me will shorten and simplify one of the most time consuming activities and will benefit everybody.