Allow observers to participate during meetings

[traviscross]

The original observer policy is written in such a way that any message sent by an observer, except during check-in and check-out, is a violation of the policy.

However, this policy is often violated in practice, and such violations often add useful context that is helpful to the council. The fact that these are violations puts the facilitator in the awkward position of either ignoring a piece of useful information that the council should consider or seeming to validate a violation of the policy by acknowledging it.

These violators are -- in all cases to date -- respected project members who are adding this context in good faith and with the intention of helping the council. Consequently, we've not had much apparent appetite for enforcing the policy by reprimanding such members or banning them from future meetings.

This is all kind of a silly situation to be in, so let's change the policy to explicitly allow for such messages to be sent, while simply asking observers to be judicious in sending these messages so as to avoid distractions.

[eholk]

@rfcbot merge

[rfcbot]

Team member @eholk has proposed to merge this. The next step is review by the rest of the tagged team members:

• @Mark-Simulacrum
• @eholk
• @ehuss
• @jamesmunns
• @m-ou-se
• @oli-obk
• @traviscross

Concerns:

• side-conversations (Allow observers to participate during meetings #110 (comment))

Once a majority of reviewers approve (and at most 2 approvals are outstanding), this will enter its final comment period. If you spot a major issue that hasn't been raised at any point in this process, please speak up!

See this document for info about what commands tagged team members can give me.

[eholk]

I wonder if it's worth linking and/or quoting this section from the sync meeting policy:

• No side conversations in chat: The chat functionality is only used to raise non-urgent points of order and to ask non-urgent clarification questions which can then be verbally surfaced either by the facilitator or whoever has the floor. Side conversations that diverge from the main conversation of the meeting should be avoided.

I like that we mostly don't use chat during our meetings now so if we relax the policy here, I'd like to avoid chat becoming a lot more active. I'm wondering if it's worth making some statement like "Council members are under no obligation to read or acknowledge the chat."

Most of the chats we've had so far have been okay and even helpful, but there have been times when I found them distracting. I suspect in the cases where it's been distracting, the main reason has been around the violation of norms.

[traviscross]

@rfcbot reviewed

[Mark-Simulacrum]

@rfcbot concern side-conversations

I would like to see the quote @eholk mentions added/referenced, at minimum.

The current language:

encouraged to do so if they have important context to add that may be helpful to the council

feels like a bit too strong to me. I would not want the in-meeting chat to turn into a vehicle for important context. That should be put into a more permanent venue (e.g., Zulip or GitHub issue we are discussing) -- otherwise that, to me, implies that the meeting must be paying active attention to chat and essentially at that point we're changing the observer policy much more significantly here (from observers to effectively participants). That might be warranted, but I think we shouldn't do it this way with a "small" edit.

[traviscross]

Regarding the feedback, please find now included three changes:

• A description of and reference to our decorum policy on no side conversations.
• A note that members may not read or acknowledge messages sent in chat, and that information of importance should be conveyed additionally via another channel.
• A clarification that messages adding context are encouraged when they are "of immediate concern".

If we're going to allow messages from observers while discouraging some kinds of them (distractions and side conversations), I think it important for balance to describe what kind of messages we would like to encourage.

In my view, if we're about to make a decision based on incorrect or incomplete information, or if we realize we don't know some bit of information we need, and the observer does know that thing, those seem like times we'd like to encourage the observer to send a chat message. (The violations in the last meeting fell under this latter category, e.g.) I've tried to encode that with:

if they have important context to add that may be helpful to the council and is of immediate concern

This is then itself balanced by the note that we still may not read it or acknowledge it.

Regarding:

That might be warranted, but I think we shouldn't do it this way with a "small" edit.

I do not consider this a small edit. It's a full-fledged policy change proposed for FCP.

[spastorino]

To add some extra information, something that has happened with my participations in council meetings ... I was asked to say some stuff in 2 meetings and I wasn't able to participate, because I wasn't in a good setup for that (I was having lunch or with my daughters, and was just following the meeting on the side). So, out of courtesy and as I wanted to avoid blocking you ... I've a couple of times "violated" the policy because I ended explaining in the chat that I wasn't able to speak and why :).

In general, regardless that I may have some things to say, I just avoid saying things, but I also do wonder ... if somebody says ... hey Santiago told me A and B and I feel I need to clarify as A and B are not really accurate, should I say something or pretend I'm not there? :).
I'm genuinely interested in knowing what's your take as I'd in general just avoid active participation but maybe in this case I should just write a phrase?.

Mentioning all this for you to also consider these kind of situations when improving the policy.

[traviscross]

Thanks for that context. Those are exactly the sort of situations I have in mind in proposing this policy change.

[traviscross]

@rfcbot cancel

We discussed this in our last meeting, and we ended up leaning toward preferring a policy that would allow full normal interaction by observers. We'll update the proposal to reflect this, propose a new FCP, and renominate.

[rfcbot]

@traviscross proposal cancelled.

[clarfonthey]

FWIW, it appears that this proposal was ultimately blocked on TC updating it, according to the minutes, but that just never happened, repeatedly, until the outstanding PRs for the repo was removed from the agenda. Before observing the latest meeting I tried to understand what the current policy was and had no idea, deferring to the more restrictive one, since it seemed that it was explicitly clarified that observers can participate for several meetings before that stopped happening.

It seems that a lot of the current status quo is not documented, since e.g. the latest meeting was even facilitated by someone who by-the-books was an observer, but I would imagine that Foundation PDs and various Foundation staff are both welcome to attend Council meetings and encouraged to participate whenever something is relevant, so, maybe those folks don't necessarily qualify for this policy and instead are just normal meeting participants.

Not that this is top priority right now, just, wanted to express that things are very confusing, especially for new folks wanting to participate, and maybe it would be possible to figure this out async without it taking up meeting time.

[traviscross]

Thanks. I've now revised this PR to match our current practices.

[rustbot]

This PR was rebased onto a different main commit. Here's a range-diff highlighting what actually changed.

Rebasing is a normal part of keeping PRs up to date, so no action is needed—this note is just to help reviewers.

[Kobzol]

Thanks! That looks pretty simple and corresponds to what we do today. We can discuss it at the next meeting and then finally FCP it.

View changes since this review

[Manishearth]

question: is the goal of this that observers participate basically "fully equally" in the meetings? Or more that they are expected to be silent most of the time but encouraged to add things on occasion? We should probably set that norm.

This might be a way to utilize chat, too, if we want the norm of "mostly silent but encouraged to add things" then encouraging (a) the usage of chat for pasting links/etc and (b) saying "queue to talk about XYZ"

w3c meetings do this: you can optionally briefly say what you are queueing up to say when you queue, which both serves as a reminder when it is your turn and also helps the facilitator prioritize the queue where necessary

View changes since the review

[traviscross]

My goal in drafting was simply to faithfully encode what our norms have been over the past 1-2 years. If we want to adjust, I'm happy to encode that as well.

What the text means to say is that observers are welcome to participate in the normal way that people not on the team do in other team meetings. That is, they are not breaching a boundary to put up a hand. But at the same time, they should focus on keeping the signal to noise ratio high. That may mean being a bit reserved, as they may not have all the context. And, generally, it's understood that most room needs to be saved for those actually making the decision (and those who are otherwise deeply connected with it).

Regarding chat, the general norm has been to avoid its use in council meetings. Earlier councils were concerned about having side conversations in chat, and things posted there had a kind of ambiguous status as people may not see them and were not thought to be required to look for them.¹ Of course, this is malleable, and I agree that the use you mention of queuing oneself would not have that risk. On the other hand, having facilitated many meetings, I can say that one is often a bit task saturated when facilitating, and I personally would find it challenging to keep up with the chat being used in that way without better tooling support than what we currently have.²

Footnotes

1. This ambiguity also creates challenges for minuting the meeting appropriately. ↩

2. By better tooling support, and without endorsing it specifically, I mean something in the manner of https://tcq-reloaded.com/ and its variants, one of which I understand to be used by TC39. ↩

[Manishearth]

What the text means to say is that observers are welcome to participate in the normal way that people not on the team do in other team meetings.

I'm not sure this is uniform across the project. Explicitly spelling the expectation out might be helpful. But I don't think we have to.

[traviscross]

Makes sense. I've now elaborated that section a bit.