Keeping IRC meetings moving

[Robie Basak]

In today's meeting, as a follow-up to limiting meetings to one
applicant per meeting, we talked about how we could keep meetings moving
along.

A common frustration seems to be when waiting for other DMB members to
respond in the past, for no apparent reason. When that happens, we don't
know if they're preparing a long answer, have become absent, or just
aren't paying attention.

We acknowleged that it's not really a problem, on occasion, to be
unavailable for a meeting, or to mention that someone has their
attention elsewhere and will be slow to respond. As long as it doesn't
hold up the meeting, and as long as it isn't frequent enough that we
struggle to make quorum.

But just being slow to respond, especially after having gotten involved
in a topic, causes long delays, and there's general unhappiness about
this.

We agreed we'd like to socially encourage people who aren't available to
not waste everyone's time.

To try and turn this into concrete proposal, I suggest that:

1) We accept that it's OK for DMB members to be absent or distracted for
whatever reason, but not to hold up meetings because of this. Corollary:
if as a DMB member you are so distracted that you're holding up the
meeting, then maybe you should consider yourself to be actually absent,
and conscious to not hold the others up waiting on you.

2) We think that three minutes is about the *maximum* that should
normally be acceptable for a response from a DMB member, with the
majority of responses expected to be much quicker than that.

3) If a DMB member holds up meeting progress for more than three minutes
because we're waiting for a response from them, then the chair should
consider that person to be absent and move on. This includes voting: if
that means the vote wasn't quorate, then we will end the vote and
continue as if that person was absent anyway.

4) DMB members should prepare questions and comments in advance as much
as possible to avoid holding up meetings while they research, think and
type.

5) However, we don't want to prevent people from taking their time to
research, think or or type long answers when this is actually required -
for example in response to something that happened during the meeting
itself. So a DMB member can indicate that they are genuinely active in
the meeting but not ready to speak yet by sending "...", or a longer
explanation if they wish, at least once every three minutes. This can
include thinking time, doing research on an application, working on a
long answer, etc. We will take "..." to mean "I'm still here, working on
my next message to the channel, extending my timeout by another three
minutes". The meeting will normally then wait for their message before
moving on, subject to the chair's discretion.

6) For the avoidance of doubt, the above applies to DMB members only,
not to anyone else, and certainly not to applicants. We've not seen an
issue with applicants being unreasonably slow to respond, and want them
to give us thoughtful responses and not feel under any additional
pressure. They should respond as feel appropriate and as they always
have done.

This might be difficult to do in practice for social/politeness reasons.
If we actually want this to happen, we should actively support the chair
by calling out delays in meetings in practice. If we don't, then I don't
think we'll see any improvement.

Robie
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