[uf-discuss] Re: meeting minutes: microformats needed?

[brush]

thanks, again, all of you.

On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 01:37:23PM -0700, Chris Messina wrote:
> I mean, the framework of what we're talking about is people having
> conversations with one or more speakers. in this application of that
> framework, there are decisions, key points, decision points, requests
> for follow up or addit'l info, and assignments and/or tasks (possibly
> more).

this is something i've thought a bit about.  it seems to me that in any
recorded, discrete conversation there are two primary realms of
information: the participants and their relationships, and the "content"
(both performative, ie. a decision or assignment, and discursive, ie. a
topic or argument).

that's why i have an idea that rather than a single hminutes microformat
that puts it all together, we create a variety of microformats that
address the two realms, and then extend/restrict as needed for the
hminutes-specific uses.  i think that's in line with the thinking here.
;)

in other words, as i said earlier, decisions, tasks, topics (ie. tags),
and arguments (now that would be fun to ontologize!) all exist in spaces
outside of meetings, and could be used in various ways in the ecology of
microformats.

this does bring us back to question of how to describe a group of people
and the relationships among them, within a specific context.  if it's a
list of hcards with the "role" class used to distinguish their relation
to the parent class (eg. "facilitator" for a particular meeting, but not
all meetings, or "proponent" for a particular decision/argument), then
we're not going to have a particularly flexible or extensible mechanism
for describing the relationships *between* people, and how they change.
that's not particularly necessary for hminutes, say, but it might be in
many other contexts: could something like xfn-extended be used to
describe, say, the evolving dynamics between countries in historical
terms, or between a group of high school friends as they age, or between
actors in a play.  for that we'd need datestamps... ah, but we're far
from our use-cases now!  ;)  anyway, thoughts; but for the moment, a
list of hcards with roles.  :)

> Point is, there is a larger need here that could be informed by
> formats outside the 'meeting minutes' space -- that have already been
> documented on the wiki.

besides chat, distributed-conversation (perhaps?), hcalendar,
vote-links, what other microformats are going to be particularly useful
in this?

> In any case, very excited to see this work unfold.

me too!  thanks for the ideas and encouragement.
.b

> 
> Chris
> 
> On 5/3/06, Tantek ?elik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> >On 5/3/06 12:19 PM, "Scott Reynen" <scott at randomchaos.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On May 3, 2006, at 1:43 PM, brush wrote:
> >>
> >>> one thought about "role": is it appropriate to re-engineer the
> >>> category
> >>> from what is apparently originally intended as a relatively static
> >>> feature (ie. "sales engineer" for a person or "green construction" for
> >>> an organization) to something relevant only in the immediate context
> >>> (ie. "notetaker" for a specific meeting, or "abstain" for a vote)?
> >>
> >> It looks to me like "role" in vCard and hCard means what "role" in
> >> English means.  I would say "notetaker" is a role, but "abstain" is
> >> not.
> >
> >I agree with Scott.
> >
> >> Maybe "abstainer" could be a role, but it would need to be
> >> defined within a very specific context, unless you're describing
> >> someone who just goes around abstaining all day.  I think roles need
> >> to be nouns, not verbs.
> >
> >Agreed with this clarification as well.
> >
> >Thanks Scott,
> >
> >Tantek
> >
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