General IRC conventions

• say present+ (or present+ ircNickHere) at the start of the meeting to record your attendance.
• /me goes to look it up comments are omitted from the record. Use it when you’re saying something off-topic; don’t use it when you’re saying something that should be in the minutes.
• q+ puts you on the speaking queue. qq+ puts you at the *front* of the queue. Saying q+ to say XXX will leave a reminder message of what you wanted to talk about, which’ll be displayed when you’re acknowledged in the queue. Saying q+ anythingelse will add someone named “anythingelse” to the queue.
• ack ircNickHere drops the named person from the queue, showing their reminder message if set.
• q? shows the current queue.
• all of the q+, q?, and ack commands can be used with /me (for example /me q+) so that they’re omitted from the minutes and the logs that github-bot posts to github issues

Scribing Conventions

• Make sure Zakim, RRSAgent, and github-bot are all in the channel. Ping the chairs if they aren’t. Zakim and RRSAgent can be invited to the channel with the /invite command; github-bot should be in the channel automatically.
• If your meeting will cross midnight UTC, say rrsagent, this meeting spans midnight
• If you want Zakim to stay for a long time (say, the entire day of a face-to-face), ask Zakim to remind you of something in X hours (e.g., Zakim, remind us in 9 hours to go home)
• If you’re scribing, use ScribeNick: yourircnick to tell the bot your messages should be read as scribing rather than comments.
  • If there’s more than one scribe at the same time, you can use Scribe+ nickname. But note that this lasts for the entire meeting, whereas a later ScribeNick overrides an earlier one.
• Write all scribing comments as speakersIRCnick: blah blah blah. You should be able to rely on tab completion for names.
• github-bot, topic https://github.com/.../issues/1234 (or, preferably, /me github-bot, topic https://github.com/.../issues/1234) starts a new topic, and instructs the bot to fetch the issue title and use it as the topic. When another topic starts, it will post all the minutes as a comment to that issue. github-bot, subtopic [url] similarly works if you want a thematic break in the minutes.
  • Topic: Deciding on lunch just starts a new topic, closing the old one.
  • github: https://github.com/… just changes the issue the current topic is associated with.
  • github-bot, end topic (or, preferably, /me github-bot, end topic) just closes the current topic without opening a new one.
• There are a few log-editing commands that are supported by scribe.perl, which the CSSWG generally doesn’t use, but many other working groups use (via the RRSAgent bot, which invokes it when generating minutes. They may eventually be supported by github-bot as well, but currently aren’t (but members reading the minutes can still self-apply them, so it’s useful to record):
  • s/foo/foo, but bar/ Perl syntax (or s$$$ if you’d rather escape dollar signs than slashes) can be used to correct lines in the minutes. By default it makes the substitution in the most recent matching line; you can apply it globally with s/typo'd name/correct name/g.
  • i/search/addition/ can be used to add lines to the minutes. For example, if you missed a ScribeNick command, you can write i/what about the text-combine-horizontal property/ScribeNick: heycam/ to add a ScribeNick: heycam line before the most recent line that contains what about the text-combine-horizontal property.
• RESOLVED: Apply X to Y records a resolution for the current topic. (The all-caps is important.) These will get collected and displayed at the top of the topics by the minutes displayers.