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Organizing a distributed meeting

This Guidebook is the collected wisdom of the W3C Group Chairs and other collaborators.

W3C benefits from diverse, inclusive, and worldwide participation. This document provides guidance to those organizing distributed meetings.

Dealing with timezones

A distributed meeting is one where most of the attendees are expected to participate from remote locations (e.g., by telephone, video conferencing, or IRC).

— W3C Process Document

A Chair should build consensus about the time slots for distributed meetings and should reevaluate that consensus on a regular basis. A good practice is to re-evaluate at the semi-annual spring and fall shifts in daylight saving time, and upon significant changes in membership or participation.

When scheduling regularly occurring distributed meetings, the Chair should consider rotating meeting times if that helps a broader group of members to participate.

W3C being an international organization, its meetings are impacted by holidays in various countries and cultures. You can find a list of holidays to take into consideration.

A Chair might use the following steps for proposing time slots:

• Collect participants' time zones
• Propose candidate time slots, at least some of which start beween 06:00 and 00:00 in each participant's timezone (see the World Clock Meeting Planner)
• If using a tool such as doodle.com to collect feedback, provide alternative mechanisms to participants who have trouble accessing the tool

A Chair should consider the following when judging the group's consensus:

• Prioritize preferences of core participants based on the meeting agenda
• Give consideration to all preferences, including those in the minority, taking care to not systematically disenfranchise any participants.
• If the group can not reach a consensus, the Chair has the discretion to make a decision.

The W3C Process provides rules about the timing of meeting announcements and agenda publication.

Group calendars

Group calendars are available from lists of Groups. For each Group, there is a 'Calendar' tab.

• Group and Task Force Chairs and Team contacts can schedule meetings, recurring or not.
• Events and calendars can be exported as iCal files and subscribed to from third-party calendaring clients.
• Group participants and other invited people are notified by email of new meetings and scheduling changes. This can be opted out from your profile.
• All users have a personal calendar listing all meetings they are invited to.

Creating an event

Things to keep in mind:

1. Create the event as 'Draft' and keep it as such until you're ready to get your event listed on the Group calendar.

   Draft events are found through your personal calendar 'My Drafts', so only 'Tentative' and 'Confirmed' events will appear on the Group calendar page.

2. Assume a newcomer will look at your event, so use standalone information as much as possible and use links in the event description, agenda, and joining instructions fields, so a new participant can follow links and find out the additional information.
3. Joining link and instructions are restricted. The information will NOT be part of public email ntofications and can only be seen by W3C members, participants in the invited groups and additional invitees, so it's safe to put passcodes in the joining instructions.
4. Avoid sending multiple email notifications:
   1. When updating, select "Update but don't send notifications"
   2. Check your information on the resulted event page
   3. If satisfied, go back into "Edit" mode and use "Update" to send the notifications out.

A suggested workflow for recurring events is to create the event with the recurrence rule, keeping the status as 'Tentative'. This will create the multiple occurences of your recurring meeting (up to one year ahead) and notify participants (unless they opted out) of the tentative meetings. Once you're ready to confirm the meeting and include the agenda, update the single occurence and change the meeting status to 'Confirmed'. This will notify participants and the Group mailing list of the updated event. Once the minutes of the meeting are available, update again the single occurence to point to the minutes so that it's easy to find them later in the 'Past Events' tab of your Group calendar.

The W3C Calendar system does support timezones but does not provide facilitation for finding suitable times within a set of timezones. We recommend using online resources, such as the World Clock Meeting Planner and doodle.

Report issues on GitHub if you find any.

Feedback is to @w3c/guidebook and is welcome on GitHub