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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:

• Denote that someone is speaking with says
  • Eg. “@Sandro says hi everybody, I have lots of work to report on today!”
• If one person is speaking a lot, you don’t need to type their name on every line; use .. as a continuation.
  • Eg. “.. and I look forward to hearing what everyone else has been doing.”
  • It’s up to you whether you want to type a long monologue all at once, or break it up.
• Use the Zulip @-handles, ie. start typing “@Name” and press enter when the right person pops up in the UI.
  • If someone is not in Zulip, type **@Their Name** so the script can parse this as a speaker anyway.

Special terms

• TOPIC: topic creates a subhead for “topic” in the minutes. Please use this! Topics are typically on the agenda beforehand, so you can prepare what to expect by glancing over that.
• PROPOSED: proposal adds the proposal to the list of proposals.
• RESOLVED: resolution adds the resolution to the list of resolutions.
• scribe: name records the name of the scribe (optional)
• present+ adds whoever says it to the list of attendees (scribe doesn’t need this)

Scribe rights

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

• Ask for their name
  • Since we’re using Zoom for the call, if you have the ‘gallery view’ open alongside Zulip, it’s pretty easy to tell who is speaking.
• Ask for clarification of a point
• Ask them to repeat something
• Ask for an acronym expansion or jargon decoding, etc.

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.

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