Good meetings

This is a stub page that will probably pull some stuff from my WikiDev16 page. Right now I'm just getting this wikified.

Taxonomy
This attempts to provide a taxonomy for consensus-oriented meetings between engineering peers (possibly from different employers) rather than WMF-controlled meetings.
 * Discuss a problem that we don’t know how to solve
 * Successful outcome: an idea or a reasonably complete list of ideas for how to solve the problem
 * Successful outcome: consensus on the priority about the importance of solving this problem (or consensus that it isn’t a problem after all)
 * Non-goal: a decision for how to solve the problem


 * Talk in depth about an engineering idea that doesn’t have consensus
 * Successful outcome: more people know about the idea, and maybe more people agree that it’s a great idea
 * Non-goal: consensus about the priority of implementing the engineering idea


 * Narrow down choices for solving a problem
 * Successful outcome: tentative consensus about the limited set of options, with someone assigned to clearly document the tentative consensus in an email to wikitech-l
 * Non-goal: singular consensus about the solution to the problem.  This is a nice outcome, but is a stretch goal at best.


 * Tentative consensus about the best solution to a problem
 * Successful outcome: tentative consensus on a singular most viable solution to a problem, with agreement to postpone or eliminate competing solutions from consideration.  Someone assigned to clearly document the tentative consensus in an email to wikitech-l
 * Non-goal: “Resourcing agreement”.  We want to walk away from this type of meeting with tentative engineering consensus about the proper solution for the problem, but not an insistence for a real-time promise to “dedicate resources” to the proposed solution.


 * Education: teaching people about an idea that already has consensus and/or has been implemented
 * Successful outcome: more widespread interest and knowledge about an existing engineering solution, and/or recruitment of people to support/maintain/use/implement the solution
 * Non-goal: retroactive blessing of a controversial portion of our system