I was talking with @kevin about this, and he had interesting things to say, so I’m creating this thread for him to say them again. 
Ok, I will! 
I think we should disourage doing meetings in team rooms in favor of
using meeting rooms because:
If a team is having a meeting, it occupies their room and people
asking questions or needing help with something could cause confusion in
the meeting or worse, see a meeting is going on and not seek help.
We definitely saw this when we tried to do standups in our main
infrastructure irc channel.
People can join rooms and see all the various meetings going by and
perhaps see something that sparks their interest and causes them to
interact with that team or provide information that the team wouldn’t
have from their own members. We have definitely seen this in the past
with IRC meeting channels over and over again. Sometimes people were not
even aware some team or group existed until they noticed them talking
about something in a meeting.
A lot of people don’t have time / interest to join every room for a team
they might have only some partial interest in, but if the teams meet in
a meeting room you can say your 2cents and not have to invest attention
in being in their room all the time.
Hopefully that makes some sense.
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It makes perfect sense!
I can attest to learning from lurking at meetings and/or scrolling
through them afterwards.
for having meetings in dedicated rooms
Tagging @jflory7, for relevance to our conversation about consistent guidelines for Fedora project / team communications.
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Fair enough. It makes sense. Do we know if the new Matrix-native Zodbot could get a .nextmeetings alias again? It would be nice if we could encourage teams to plan their meetings in Fedocal and reserve a meeting room that way. I often relied on .nextmeetings and .nextmeeting #fedora-meeting-XY to know whether I would run up against someone else’s meeting.
One of the things that discouraged me from using the public meeting rooms was that it is hard to quickly look up what team has reserved a meeting room when. Sometimes I would start a meeting, only to find out that another team had reserved it, and then we lose half of our meeting to try and get people to the right place. Maybe my Fedocal-fu is weak after so long, but fixing this would address my only real reservation about using the open meeting rooms.
Tagging @ryanlerch and @abompard for their input on Zodbot viability.
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I submitted a PR just now on the repo to add the functionality based on the original IRC bot. I changed !nextmeetings to require a room input so you could ask for the next three meetings instead of the next meeting.
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I think the benefit of keeping meetings in their relevant channels is that all of the content from that team is in one place. While someone may catch something interesting happening live in the meeting channel, the information after the fact is lost to notes that are moved up by the next meeting that comes up. There may be channels that I follow where I know I’m missing context because a meeting happened somewhere else.
It’s also not obvious which meeting room a meeting may be happening in, so folks have to ask or may not think to ask. They can be pointed to Fedocal, but then you’d have to confirm with each team you want to follow whether their Fedocal appointments are accurate or not.
By keeping all content in one channel it’s clear where all of the information is. It’s just a matter of how much activity there is. Sometimes activity is kind of moderate and sometimes there’s a ton of back and forth because there’s a meeting going on. That’s just how chats work.
If all channels can report their logs to https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/, so I’m ok on having them on their own channels. This will also be a step away from IRC.
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I think the benefit of keeping meetings in their relevant channels is that all of the content from that team is in one place. While someone may catch something interesting happening live in the meeting channel, the information after the fact is lost to notes that are moved up by the next meeting that comes up. There may be channels that I follow where I know I’m missing context because a meeting happened somewhere else.
But all the content isn’t there… docs aren’t, mailing lists,
discourse, etc. It’s already all not in one place.
It’s also not obvious which meeting room a meeting may be happening in, so folks have to ask or may not think to ask. They can be pointed to Fedocal, but then you’d have to confirm with each team you want to follow whether their Fedocal appointments are accurate or not.
We should assume they are accurate and/or remove them if not.
But yeah, thats a fair concern, which we could mitigate some perhaps
with the bot reporting things.
Also, it may not be obvious when meetings are happening in team specific
channels either.
By keeping all content in one channel it’s clear where all of the information is. It’s just a matter of how much activity there is. Sometimes activity is kind of moderate and sometimes there’s a ton of back and forth because there’s a meeting going on. That’s just how chats work.
Sure, but dedicated meeting rooms you expect meetings to happen.
team specific rooms you might just be talking about something unrelated
and… a meeting starts. Or you could join in the middle of a meeting
and expect to causally discuss something with the team, but they are all
discussing meeting topics.
Finally, I’ll make one more argument… having meeting rooms helps avoid
teams being isolated. If you have a team room, only ever talk in it,
meet in it, how ‘connected’ to the rest of the project are you?
Others may not know whats going on there, or only have a slight interest
(not enough to join a team room), but if discussion happened in a
meeting room, they might be surprised and delighted by what a team is
doing.
In the end, I guess we could just say teams can decide, but I think we
end up loosing something by teams doing meetings in their own rooms.
I’ll stop now, but thanks for the good discussion points.
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This is amazing!!! Extra cookies for you! 
I wonder how the bot would handle meeting conflicts? Would it just show them all at once?
Ultimately, I think this is the heart of it. I do not think we could mandate one way or another, but we could provide recommendations on best practices to teams like this meeting guide wiki page I wrote up a long time ago.
I think there are pros and cons to both approaches. There is not one-size-fits-all here. I think I was persuaded that a good default to encourage for all would be to use a meeting room for a Meetbot-powered meeting, but I wouldn’t guilt a team for choosing to run their meeting in their own room. In the case of teams that deal with a lot of newcomers, it can make the ease of discovering a meeting easier. Admittedly, I am not in a good habit of following meeting channels outside of specific meetings, but it might just be a me thing since I am in a lot of Matrix rooms.
I am thinking to document this info somewhere about meetings. Is there somewhere obvious that this kind of content should go, or should I add it to my catch-all Community Architecture docs site?
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This is amazing!!! Extra cookies for you!
I wonder how the bot would handle meeting conflicts? Would it just show them all at once?
I haven’t looked, but the old one I think looked at fedocal.
So, it shouldn’t be possible to have conflicts, you wouldn’t be able to
add the second one to fedocal.
Ultimately, I think this is the heart of it. I do not think we could mandate one way or another, but we could provide recommendations on best practices to teams like this meeting guide wiki page I wrote up a long time ago.
I think there are pros and cons to both approaches. There is not one-size-fits-all here. I think I was persuaded that a good default to encourage for all would be to use a meeting room for a Meetbot-powered meeting, but I wouldn’t guilt a team for choosing to run their meeting in their own room. In the case of teams that deal with a lot of newcomers, it can make the ease of discovering a meeting easier. Admittedly, I am not in a good habit of following meeting channels outside of specific meetings, but it might just be a me thing since I am in a lot of Matrix rooms.
I am thinking to document this info somewhere about meetings. Is there somewhere obvious that this kind of content should go, or should I add it to my catch-all Community Architecture docs site?
Also I was hoping we could decide on using meeting rooms because it
means the meeting bot only needs to be in those rooms.
I guess we can add it on a per request basis for teams that want to meet
in their own room (but I don’t think we should just globally add it to
all rooms).
I’m not sure where that would be best documented…
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