• Workflow Management Coalition

Workflow Management Coalition Meeting Guidelines

Guiding Principle

People who show up to a WfMC meeting or attend remotely are contributing their time to move the goals of the WfMC forward. Our collective goal then is to make that time worthwhile and effective.

Pragmatic Considerations

As we are a technology oriented group, we should consider leveraging the capabilities of recent technologies as much as possible, particularly those Web 2.0 technologies that have been shown to be effective.

• Wiki - the WfMC provides a wiki within which to share and communicate information of all forms. This should be leveraged.
• Document Exchange - the wiki has document attachment capabilities and can be used to give copies of document to others. Existing documents can be updated with newer version as needed.
• Email - a number of mailing lists exist, but the main purpose of email should be kept to notifications of events and occurrances. Documents and information should be posted on the Wiki.

Preparation

Web Locus: Every meeting should have a place on the web to place the agenda, presentations, document, notes, and minutes. This is a wiki page for the meeting.

A meeting should have an agenda showing what will be discussed so that people can prepare for the discussion. If there is a presentation to be made, the presentation should be uploaded to the page. If documents are to be discussed, they should be available before the meeting.

Running the meeting.

Meetings should only be held in places that have ready internet access for all participants. Those attending view phone or web conference would naturally be expected to have network access.

Meetings are working sessions, and the result of the meeting is the notes that convey the results of discussions. A discussion that takes place without anything written down is useful only to the people who attend, and yet not very useful because the next time they discuss that subject they will have to go through all the arguments again. If the discussion, including positions and conclusions are captured, they can be read later by many people, and save everyone a lot of work. We should think of "undocumented discussions" as being only for pleasure, but meetings are about accomplishments, and therefor all discussions should be documented.

Writing up meeting minutes after the meeting takes a lot of extra time, and nobody has lots of extra time. The minutes to be prepared during the meeting.

Every meeting should have at least one designated scribe who commits to writing down the discussions as they progress. Yet that is not sufficient. Other attendees of a meeting should also take notes, and contribute to the record. It will take two or three people to accurately capture a discussion, especially since the scribe will want to participate in the discussion as well. The scribe, however, will be responsible for merging the notes of various people.

Using the "Process Leaves" Wiki

This tool has been designed to help us work better together.

The "Leaf" is the fundamental unit in this wiki. Each leaf is a small collection of associated pages. Leaves can be edited directly by people involved in a task.

There is a public section which is truly open for all the public to see. This can be used as a "display case" to present material to the public. Most of what the WfMC does is to gather and organize information so this will be a way to publish this information. Or it can be used as a short description if the subject of the page is not suitable for public use.

Each leaf has a collection of members. People can sign up and request to be members, and other members can let them in. This is like a "group". Once they are let in, they can fully participate in the work there.

A leaf has a collection of documents: a public collection and a members only collection. You don't need any FTP program to upload or download these documents. If you are making a document available to the public this is a way to do it, and of course it is a way to share documents within the group without filling up everyone's email inbox.

There is a comments section (again public and members-only). The comments can be written by any member, and edited only by that same member. Use these for comments, as well as for question/answers about the subject of the leaf. People are safe editing comments at the same time, because each user can edit only their own comments. Be careful about editing the regular content in a meeting because only one person can update at a time.

There is a tasks section to record all the action items of the group. Once assigned to a person, this can be gathered into a true task list across all leaves (and even across multiple servers using Workcast protocol).