Wikimedia Technical Committee/Facilitator's Guide

The facilitator uses a set of defined communications practices to prepare, document, and share committee activities.

Creating the agenda
Each private committee meeting records its agenda and minutes in a private Google Doc. To create an agenda:


 * Make a copy of the template (requires access to the Technical Committee Google Drive), and rename the file with the meeting date.
 * Copy action items from the previous week’s meeting minutes into the “Status of our action items” section of the agenda.

Taking meeting minutes
During the planning meeting, the facilitator should take notes by subject and speaker, providing links to relevant Phabricator tasks and updating the times shown in the agenda to reflect the progress of the discussion.

To complete the minutes:


 * Extract action items into the action items section.
 * Summarize the minutes into 3-10 bullet points, and add them to the public notes section.

Public notes example


 * Discussed: Strategy for PHP interface changes . This RFC proposes policies and strategies to mitigate problems arising from the need to change PHP interfaces that are implemented by classes defined by extensions. In particular, it proposes a separate policy that defines the stable interface for use by extensions, see .


 * Discussed: Reconsider how we run QUnit unit tests . This RFC proposes restructuring unit tests away from using QUnit.


 * Discussed: Serve Main Page of WMF wikis from a consistent URL . This RFC proposes serving a wiki’s main page from the domain root. The configuration option has been merged as disabled by default, and the RFC is ready for discussion with stakeholders.


 * Discussed: Need to clarify consequences of approved RFC Define criteria for setting explicit PHP support target for MediaWiki . Guidelines established by this RFC should be available on mediawiki.org, including process for announcing changes to the PHP version required for core on wikitech-l.


 * No IRC meeting next week

Public discussions
When scheduled, public RFC discussions on IRC happen directly after the private TechCom meetings and take place in #wikimedia-office on Freenode.

Sending a reminder email
An hour before the RFC discussion on IRC starts, send a reminder to Wikitech-l.

Example

Subject: Up next: RFC discussion about versioning of the new core REST API. This was already announced in the last TechCom Radar email, but in case you have missed it:

In an hour, we will be talking about the versioning mechanism for the new REST API in MediaWiki core: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T232485

You can join the discussion on the #wikimedia-office channel.

Chairing the meeting
We use MeetBot commands to manage the meeting and generate notes. See the example notes from 2019-05-29.

Use the bot to start the meeting, call out #info for the meeting summary, and end the meeting. The chair should also collect questions, remind people of the current topic, and try to facilitate a structured discussion.

Public minutes
Moved to Wikimedia Technical Committee/Processes.