The Jabber Scribe Role at IETF Meetings
draft-saintandre-jabber-scribe-00
During IETF meetings, individual volunteers often help sessions run more smoothly by relaying information back and forth between the physical meeting room and an associated textual chatroom. Such volunteers, commonly called "Jabber scribes", might benefit from the suggestions provided in this document.
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During IETF meetings, individual volunteers often help sessions run more smoothly by relaying information back and forth between the physical meeting room and an associated textual chatroom. Because these chatrooms are currently implemented using Jabber/XMPP technologies (see [RFC6120] and [XEP-0045]) the role is commonly referred to as that of a "Jabber scribe".
This role is important because it is the primary way for a remote attendee to provide feedback or comments back into most IETF meeting sessions. Although there are multiple ways that a remote attendee can listen and follow along, the chatroom provides a method of returning feedback to the physical meeting in something close to real time. These methods hold true for IETF working group sessions, IRTF research group sessions, IETF "birds of a feather" (BoF) sessions, and similar sessions at IETF meetings.
This document provides suggestions for fulfilling the role of a Jabber scribe, based on the authors' personal experience as well as input from other individuals who frequently volunteer as Jabber scribes.
The participants in a chatroom typically fall into three categories, labelled here for ease of understanding:
- Remote Participants
Remote attendees who are listening to the audio stream or in some cases following the proceedings using a real-collaboration system (currently exemplified by the Meetecho service). These participants might wish to send questions or feedback to the physical room.
- Observers
IETF meeting attendees who are in another simultaneous session in a different physical room. These participants often monitor the chatroom to find out when a particular topic is being discussed or to observe what is being discussed in the chatroom. Typically they are not able to listen to the audio stream and sometimes they ask for a higher level of commentary so that they can know when they might need to change locations to participate in the session's physical room.
- Local Participants
IETF meeting attendees who are in the same physical room. Sometimes these participants like to follow the discussions in the physical room and the chatroom at the same time. They can also provide some assistance to Jabber scribes.
Because all chatroom sessions are logged during IETF meetings and the logs are publicly available, the logs can be a useful history of what occurs during a meeting. For that reason any additional information that can be supplied to remote participants can be helpful.
Individuals who volunteer for the role of Jabber scribe usually complete the following tasks:
- Relay questions and comments from the chatroom to the physical room. This typically involves going to the microphone to relay the comment from the remote participant.
- Count the number of chatroom participants who virtually "hum", raise their hands, volunteer to provide feedback on documents, etc., and feed that information back to the physical room.
- Relay information about hums and similar interactions from the physical room to the chatroom (preferably after receiving a "readout" from the session chairs).
It is the convention in most sessions that the Jabber scribe has the privilege to go to the front of the microphone line to relay information from remote participants. Some Jabber scribes choose to exercise that privilege while others choose to wait in line along with the participants in the physical meeting rooom.
Additionally some Jabber scribes often complete the following tasks:
- Relay the names of people speaking in the physical room to the chatroom.
- Relay the slide numbers or slide names to help chatroom participants follow along.
- Query remote participants about audio streaming quality, and relay such information to the session chairs.
- Relay to the chatroom participants any logistical or procedural issues related to the meeting (e.g., known technical glitches at the physical meeting or delays in starting the session).
- Provide links to the current set of slides and the document being discussed so that chatroom participants can easily follow along.
Although Jabber scribes are not generally expected to transcribe the complete contents of conversations that happen the physical room to the chatroom, they sometimes relay the gist of such conversations, especially during ad-hoc discussions for which slides are not available. (By prior arrangement between the session chairs and the Jabber scribe, more detailed scribing might be expected for particular sessions.)
Experience has shown that the following behaviors make it easier to act as a Jabber scribe.
If you have volunteered before the session:
- Coordinate with the chairs to ensure that remote participants have received information about where to find the meeting materials, agenda, audio stream, etc. (e.g., this information can be sent to a working group discussion list so that remote participants do not need to ask about it on entering the chatroom).
- Coordinate with the chairs to see if they have any special expectations for the Jabber scribe (e.g., some chairs might want you to transcribe more detailed information about the session proceedings into the chatroom).
- Ask the session chairs whether it is acceptable for you to advance to the front of the microphone line with time-sensitive comments from remote participants.
As you are getting settled and ready for the meeting to start:
- Seat yourself near the microphone most likely to be used for discussions in the physical room, so that you can more easily capture the names of people who come to the microphone. Typically this will be a seat near the end of a row or in some location where you can easily get up out of your seat to go to the microphone.
- It can be helpful to open several browser windows or tabs for:
- the agenda page for the session
- the materials page so that you can relay links to slides if necessary (at the time of this writing, URLs for materials related to IETF working groups are of the form "https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/<nn>/materials.html#<name>", where "nn" is the two-digit meeting number and "name" is the acronym for the working group)
- the documents page for the working group or research group (or BoF wiki page) in case you want easy access to documents mentioned but not in the agenda page
- the meeting registration system page (see below)
- It can also be helpful to run two separate Jabber clients connected to two separate Jabber servers, to prevent delays if one of the servers experiences an outage during the session.
- Determine if the session will be streamed via a realtime collaboration system such as Meetecho. If so, you can also point remote participants to that system for interaction.
- If the session is large or is expected to be especially active (e.g., a controversial BoF), find an assistant who can help you by sitting at another microphone, taking turns relaying information, etc.
Identifying one or more assistants is particularly useful if you want to go up to the microphone to speak as an individual or if you need to take a break or step out of the physical room at some point.
As you perform your role during the session:
- Identify yourself in both the physical room and the chatroom so that participants in both venues know you are a Jabber scribe.
- Ask chatroom participants what level of information they need relayed into the chatroom. For example if all chatroom participants are listening via audio or a system like Meetecho they might need less information relayed from the room.
- Ask chatroom participants to prepend statements they would like you to relay with "RELAY" or "MIC" (the former term is less ambiguous).
- When relaying a question or comment from the chatroom to the physical room, say "this is X relaying for Y from the chatroom" so that people know you are not speaking for yourself.
- It's not expected that you will know the names of everyone who comes to the microphone. If you don't know the name of a person at the microphone, you have several options:
- look at their name badge if you are seated nearby
- query them directly (calling out "state your name, please" is acceptable)
- ask in the chatroom or type something like "?? at the mic", since it is likely that a local participant will be able to identify the person for you
- look up the name of the attendee in the meeting registration system (this is typically found at a URL of the form "https://www.ietf.org/registration/<meeting>/attendance.py", such as "https://www.ietf.org/registration/ietf90/attendance.py"); you can quickly look up a name using this system if you are in doubt.
- Be aware that lag happens between the time when something is said in the physical room and the time when someone provides a response in the chatroom, and take this into account when the interaction is time-sensitive (e.g., during a hum or a show of hands).
- Because of the potential lag time, ask remote participants who are doing a hum to indicate what choice their hum is for rather than just typing "hum" into the chat room. For example, "hum yes" or "hum for option 1". You can then more easily tally the results and report them to the physical room.
- If you have a chance to do so, you may want to measure the lag time between when something is said in the room and when it is heard on the audio stream and then let the remote participants know the length of the delay. This could be accomplished by either listening to the audio stream yourself or working with a remote participant who you know is on the audio stream.
If you need to report a problem during an IETF meeting (e.g., problems with media streaming), at the time of this writing there are several ways to do so:
- For network and media streaming issues, send email to tickets@meeting.ietf.org.
- For all other issues, send email to the "Meeting Trouble Desk" via mtd@ietf.org.
- To chat with members of the Network Operations Center (NOC), join the noc@jabber.ietf.org chatroom.
- To report a problem in person, visit the help desk in the Terminal Room.
This document requests no actions from the IANA.
Although XMPP multi-user chat rooms [XEP-0045] can be configured to lock down nicknames and require registration with the chatroom in order to join, at the time of this writing IETF chatrooms are not so configured. This introduces the possibility of social engineering attacks on discussions held in IETF chatrooms. It can be helpful for Jabber scribes to be aware of this possibility.
In addition, denial of service (DoS) attacks of various kinds are possible, e.g., flooding a chatroom with unwanted or automated traffic.
9. Informative References
Thanks to Dan Burnett, Dave Crocker, Jelte Jansen, Warren Kumari, Jonathan Lennox, Alexandre Petrescu, Hugo Salgado, Yaakov Stein, and Greg Wood for their input. Thoughts and ideas sent by Wes George and Janet Gunn to an IETF 87 mailing list were also incorporated into this document.