I-Room Meeting Structure

Introduction

Here is the basic idea:

• There is a series of meetings related to a project, held at regular intervals (e.g. weekly).
• Each meeting has an agenda and a set of participants. One of the participants is the chair person, and there is a designated secretary.
• During the meeting, agenda items are discussed by the participants and minutes are taken by the secretary.
• There are generic agenda items that are part of every meeting (e.g. approve minutes of last meeting; set date for next meeting) and agenda items that are specific to a particular meeting.
• Actions may be assigned by the chair to participants and others. This is minuted automatically.
• During the meeting, items for the agenda of the next meeting may be specified, either as current items that are carried, or as new items.

It is envisaged that the meeting's chair person runs I-X and interacts with I-X during the meeting to access the meeting support available from I-X. The developments should be such that most functionality can be provided with or without running SL. It would be nice, however, if when SL is used, much of the support is accessible from SL rather than only being available by interacting with I-X directly.

Details

Generic Agenda Items

There is a set of agenda items that will be part of every meeting, with few exceptions. These are:

1. Wait for participants
2. Note apologies
3. Approve minutes of previous meeting
4. Go through actions from previous meeting
5. Discuss specific agenda items...
6. AOB
7. Summarise and agree actions
8. Set date for next meeting

Dealing With Agenda Items

When an agenda item is dealt with, it can be decided to

• mark it as done,
• mark it as not relevant,
• carry it over to the next meeting.

If an item is dealt with by decomposing it into sub-items, the old item is marked as not relevant, and the sub-items are introduced as new items for the next meeting.

Note that new items can be introduced for the next meeting at any point.

Actions

Actions are dealt with in the same way as agenda items, the only difference being that carried actions are added to the actions agreed during this meeting, whereas carried agenda items, of course, become new agenda items.

The Roles

There are only two roles - the meeting chair and the secretary.

The role of the chair was introduced because decisions should be made in a controlled way, i.e. the chair should achieve agreement before noting which decision was made at the meeting.

The role of the secretary was introduced to spread the amount of typing that is required by any one participant. The chair will have to do some typing to document decisions etc. We decided to have a designated secretary to impose some control over what is minuted. Simply recoding the meeting is possible if the meeting is conducted without using voice, but we do not want to restrict ourselves to recording only.

The Sequence of Meetings

Meetings are taken to be part of a sequence. At any meeting, there will be specific information relevant from the previous meeting. In addition, further detail from previous meetings may be useful and should be available.

Information that is always relevant is

• actions agreed (including carried ones)
• agenda items - agreed during the meeting or carried
• ...?

• participants and apologies
• logs
• materials tabled, e.g. reports, images

Notes

• "Minute the last thing Stephen said" should be possible!
• ...?

Specifications

Meeting

• project: the name of the project, e.g. "GoFish"; known
• sequence: the number of the meeting in the sequence, e.g. 3; known
• name: the name of the meeting (the project name with the sequence number, e.g. "GoFish-3"); known
• date: the date and time; set at the previous meeting
• participants: a list of people who should be at the meeting; set at the previous meeting (may be amended before the meeting). The list of participants can be split during the meeting into
• present: a sub-list of participants, i.e. those who participated; known at the start of the meeting.
• apologies: a sub-list of participants, i.e. those who could not make it; known before/at the start of the meeting.
• absent: a sub-list of participants, i.e. those who did not make it, did not apologise and were not waited for; known at the start of the meeting.
• agenda: a list of agenda items to be dealt with (see below); known by the start of the meeting (initialised at previous meeting)
• future items: a set of agenda items for the next meeting (carried or new); generated during the meeting
• actions: a set of actions to be taken outside meetings (carried or new); generated during the meeting
• minutes: a set of notes; generated during the meeting
• materials: a list of materials tabled at the meeting; generated during the meeting

Agenda Item

• name: the name of the item, e.g. "octopus character design"
• description: the description of the item, e.g. "decide what the octopus should look like"
• media: a list of media materials that are relevant to the item. This should be a list of pointers to files. The files may contain movies, images, audio, etc.
• papers: a list of document-based materials that are relevant to the item, e.g. reports, presentations, etc.. This should be a list of pointers to files

Action

• description: the description of the action, e.g. "discuss improvements to octopus2 with artists"
• item: the agenda item during which this action was generated
• person: the person who is responsible for the action to get done

Person

• type: human or avatar
• name: the name of the person, e.g. "Ai Austin"
• present: a flag that shows whether the person is in the meeting
• role: set if the person is the meeting chair or secretary. E.g. "secretary"

Decision

• description: the description of the decision, e.g. "we will use design option 3"
• item: the agenda item during which this decision was taken