Interim Meeting Management
draft-sparks-genarea-interim-management-00

Abstract

This memo discusses requirements for improvements to the datatracker related to tracking interim meetings.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on April 21, 2016.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Description of desired functionality
• 2.1. View upcoming meetings
• 2.2. Request interim meetings(s)
• 2.3. View pending requests
• 2.4. Edit a pending request
• 2.5. Cancel a request
• 2.6. Approve requests
• 2.7. Manage interim meeting material
• 2.8. Remind group chairs to submit minutes
• 3. Security Considerations
• 4. IANA Considerations
• Author's Address

1. Introduction

There are several aspects of tracking interim meetings that need to be improved. Much of the effort in scheduling interims is performed manually, and with the increase in the number of virtual interims remaining consistent is becoming difficult. The secretariat frequently has to spend time correcting errors in requests (usually incorrect or missing information) that could be minimized with better tooling. Managing announcements and maintaining a list of upcoming interims are largely manual efforts. There is currently no calendar to subscribe to for upcoming interim meetings, providing one at the moment would require manually populating the calendar. Management of interim meeting materials (agendas, slides, and minutes) is decoupled from the management of the meeting itself, leading to a current situation where chairs can create interim meeting objects in the tracker, inadvertently bypassing the current steps designed to ensure approval (if needed) and proper announcement of the meetings.

This project will address these issues through several improvements to the datatracker.

2. Description of desired functionality

2.1. View upcoming meetings

The datatracker will provide a view of all upcoming meetings (interim or otherwise), replacing the manually maintained page at http://www.ietf.org/interim.html. The entries on the page will point to meeting details (such as the datatracker meeting page for the meeting), as opposed to just a copy of the announcement. The page will highlight any upcoming meetings that had been announced but subsequently cancelled. This will be populated by looking at Session objects in the official agenda of future meetings that are in the "Scheduled" or "Cancelled" state. The new view will show the upcoming meetings in date order, and will allow filtering the results to set of areas and or working groups similar to the week-view at https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/agenda.html. The datatracker will provide the results as an html view and as an ics file, using a URL that calendaring clients can subscribe to.

2.2. Request interim meetings(s)

A person with a secretariat, AD, IRTF chair, or chair of a Working Group or Research Group can request interim meetings. The datatracker will provide a form at /meeting/interim/request that collects the following information:

• What group is meeting?
  • The secretariat can indicate any group. ADs can indicate any working group. The IRTF chair can indicate any research group. Chairs may only request interim meetings for one of their own groups. The tool will not support the notion of a "joint" interim meeting between multiple groups at this time.
• Whether the meeting has a face-to-face component
  • If there is a face-to-face component, what city, country, and time-zone will the face-to-face meeting occur in? Meetings without a face-to-face component will be modeled with empty city and country fields, and a timezone of UTC. This information is modeled in the Meeting object.
• The days and start-times, and durations of the meeting(s)
  • Meetings can span multiple days. The times for each day may be different. Multiple day meetings will be modeled as one Meeting object, with multiple TimeSlot, Session, and ScheduledSession objects.
  • A request may be for a series of meetings. These will be modeled as one Meeting object per meeting in the series, each with one TimeSlot, Session, and ScheduledSession object.
  • The tool will not support requesting a series of multiple day meetings. For now, the requester will enter a request for each multiple-day meeting separately.
  • The tool will not support requesting multiple timeslots in any given day at this time.
  • The tool will make entering times convenient for the requester. It will allow entry in any timezone. The form will show the equivalent timezone in UTC as data is being entered. The time data will be stored in TimeSlot objects reflecting the timezone of the associated Meeting object.
  • The tool will make entering duration convenient for the requester. It will show the calculated end-time of session as the duration is being entered.
• Information for remote participants
  • This information will be gathered for each session requested. Note that the data may be different for different days). This is typically Webex or other dial-in instructions. This is a free-form text field. This field must not be empty. The form will provide a hint noting that the field should contain something like "Remote participation is not supported" for meetings without such support. For those requests requiring approval (that is, the meetings have a face-to-face component), the form will encourage providing the remote participation information, but will hint that "Remote participation information will be obtained at the time of approval" is a reasonable value. (We don’t want to force people to make webex reservations in advance for a meeting that might not be approved). This information will be stored in a new "remote_instructions" CharField(max_length=1024) of each associated Session object. The form should also provide a link to information on how to obtain remote participation support. (The secretariat will provide the URL for that information - the target page will talk about things like webex-requests@ietf.org).
• Session Agendas
  • An agenda for each session as a free-form text field. Each non--empty agenda provided will be stored as an agenda Document associated with the meeting as a SessionPresentation in the associated Session object.
• Additional Information
  • Any additional information to be included in the announcement and calendar entries (as a free-form text field). This will be stored in the agenda_note field of the Meeting object.

If the requesting user is the secretariat, IRTF chair, or an AD, the form will ask whether the request is pre-approved (defaulting to yes). Chairs will not be able to indicate pre-approval.

Once a request is completed, the appropriate Meeting, Schedule, TimeSlot and Session objects will be created.

• If no pre-approval is indicated and approval is needed (the meeting contains a face-to-face component) the Session objects will be in the "Waiting for approval" state. The tool will send email to the secretariat, group chairs, and responsible area director or the IRTF chair noting that approval has been requested, showing the information entered in the request, and providing a link to the approval page for the request.
• If the request is pre-approved or no approval is needed, no email is sent. The Session objects will be in the "Approved - awaiting announcement" state. The processing below for an approved request will be immediately performed.

2.3. View pending requests

At /meeting/interim/pending, the Secretariat will see all pending (i.e. session.state == "Waiting for Approval") interim meeting requests. An AD will see all pending interim requests from working groups, with those requests from groups they are responsible for made visually distinct. The IRTF chair will see all pending requests for research groups. A chair will see all pending requests for his or her groups. For anyone with approval capability, each entry will be a link to a page showing the request details, and UI to indicate that the request is approved or disapproved.

2.4. Edit a pending request

A person with the ability to enter a request will have the ability to modify the request and leave it in the pending state.

2.5. Cancel a request

To: IETF-Announce
Cc: (WG email list)
From: IESG Secretary
Subject: [WORKING GROUP][(ACRONYM)] WG Virtual Interim 
    Meeting Cancelled (was [DATE])

The [WORKING GROUP][(ACRONYM)] Working Group virtual interim 
meeting for [DATE] from [START TIME] to [END TIME] UTC has 
been cancelled.

[ADDITIONAL INFORMATION]

A person with the ability to enter a request will have the ability to cancel the request whenever the request is pending or approved. Additional information may be provided when cancelling a request. All associated Sessions will be set to the "Cancelled" state. For each session that had been in the "Scheduled" state (that is, an announcement scheduling the meeting has already been sent), a message will be sent to IETF Announce noting the Cancellation. The message should be similar to this:

2.6. Approve requests

The Secretariat will be able to approve or disapprove any pending request. Any AD will be able to approve or disapprove any pending request from a working group. The IRTF chair will be able to approve or disapprove any pending request from a research group.

For each pending request, there will be a page that shows the request detail and the UI to indicate that the request is approved or disapproved. The approver will be able to modify the request before approving it. The page will guide the approver to carefully inspect the details of the request, particularly the remote participation information.

If the request is disapproved, all associated Sessions will be set to the "Disapproved" state and processing stops.

If the request is approved, all associated Sessions will be set to a new "Scheduled - Announcement to be sent" state and ScheduledSession objects will be created associating the Session objects with the appropriate TimeSlot objects. If the user is not the secretariat, the datatracker will send email to the Secretariat noting that an announcement needs to be sent. The message will list the details of the meeting, and provide a link to a page that allows editing and sending the announcement (/meeting/interim/announce/<meeting_name>) The user will see a page noting that the secretariat has been notified to send an announcement. If the user is the secretariat, this mail will not be sent, and the user will be redirected immediately to the above announcement editing page.

At /meeting/interim/announce, the secretariat will see all meetings with sessions in state "Scheduled - Announcement to be sent". Each entry will link to an editing/sending page as above. The editing sending page will display a composed email message, allow the secretariat to edit and then send the message, or to withdraw the request.

To: IETF-Announce
Cc: (WG email list)
From: IESG Secretary
Subject: [WORKING GROUP][(ACRONYM)] WG Virtual Interim 
   Meeting: [DATE]

The [WORKING GROUP][(ACRONYM)] Working Group will hold a 
virtual interim meeting on [DATE] from [START TIME] to 
[END TIME] UTC.

Agenda:
[AGENDA]

To join the interim meeting:
[DIAL-IN / WEBEX INFO]

[ADDITIONAL INFORMATION]

To: IETF-Announce
Cc: WG email list
From: IESG Secretary
Subject: [WORKING GROUP][(ACRONYM)] WG Interim Meeting: [DATE]

The [WORKING GROUP][(ACRONYM)] Working Group will hold an 
interim meeting on [DATE] from [START TIME] to [END TIME] UTC.

Meeting Location:
[LOCATION]

Agenda:
[AGENDA]

To join the interim meeting remotely:
[DIAL-IN / WEBEX INFO]

[ADDITIONAL INFORMATION]

• For requests that are withdrawn before they are announced, the sessions transition to "Disapproved" and processing stops. The secretariat will use this to finish the processing of requests that needed no approval (hence went directly into the "Scheduled - Announcement to be sent") but have errors that cannot be addressed by simple updates to the request. When meetings with no face-to-face component, the message will look like this (adjusted as necessary to allow for multi-day or sequences of meetings, and to say the right thing for Research Groups vs Working Groups)
• When announcing meetings with a face-to-face component, the message will look like this (adjusted as necessary as above):
• When a meeting is announced its sessions will transition to the "Scheduled" state.

2.7. Manage interim meeting material

This project will associate an initial agenda with an interim meeting. Updates to the agenda, and management of other meeting materials will be done through the normal, existing, meeting materials management tool.

2.8. Remind group chairs to submit minutes

Ten days after an interim meeting concludes, if minutes are not in the available meeting materials for that meeting, the tool will send the chairs the following message (adjusted as needed to reflect research groups vs working groups)

To: WG chairs, WG secretary
Cc: Shepherding AD
From: Proceedings
Subject: Action Required: Minutes from [WORKING GROUP][(ACRONYM)] 
  WG Interim Meeting on [DATE]

Please note that we have not yet received minutes from the 
[WORKING GROUP][(ACRONYM)] Working Group interim meeting held 
on [DATE].  As per the IESG Guidance on Interim Meetings, 
Conference Calls and Jabber Sessions [1], detailed minutes must
be provided within 10 days of the event.

At your earliest convenience, please upload meeting minutes, as 
well as any presentations from your sessions by using the Meeting 
Materials Manager found here: 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/secr/proceedings/.
Alternatively, you are welcome to send them to proceedings@ietf.org 
for manual posting.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/interim-meetings.html

3. Security Considerations

This document discusses requirements for tools to improve managing interim meetings. There are no exceptional security considerations introduced by these requirements.

4. IANA Considerations

This document has no actions for IANA.

Author's Address