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Scribing

Each week choose a scribe at random. Everyone should take a turn, and there are enough people that you won’t have to do this too often. If you’ve never scribed a meeting before, don’t worry. The basic principle is to just write down what everybody says, and attribute it to the right person - this can be verbatim if you type fast, or a summary or paraphrased if that’s easier for you (or a combination).

Syntax

We have a script that parses the Zulip logs into human-readable static minutes for the website. Here are some tips to make sure your scribing comes out right:

Special terms

Scribe rights

As the scribe, you can interrupt a speaker any time to:

If you need to speak, please ask someone else to scribe you! (It’s very hard to speak and scribe at the same time.)

Scribe responsibilities

Don’t worry about fixing typos and grammar during the meeting. You can go back and edit your messages afterwards to clean up things like this (please do!).

If you forgot to add topics, or mistyped someones name, or spelled ‘says’ wrong somewhere, please go fix these up too, ideally as soon as the meeting is over.

Keep a look out for people correcting your scribing inline, and if necessary go back and edit your messages to take their corrections into account after the meeting.