W3C IRC bots now open source

The IT/Systems Operations team as the dual function of developing and supporting the technical infrastructure required to enable and operate the work of our consortium, and the tools and environments that enable participation from around the world to contribute to our technical program.

In this series, we focus on communicating incremental improvements to our tooling.

Many W3C groups use IRC for chatting and taking minutes during teleconferences, with assistance from IRC bots.

Two of the most commonly used bots for W3C meetings are RRSAgent for recording minutes, and Zakim for agenda and queue management. These bots, written by Ralph Swick, have assisted over 60,000 meetings at W3C (yes, sixty thousand!) over the past 25 years.

These two bots are now open source, with their code and issue lists managed on GitHub: RRSAgent, Zakim.

RRSAgent helps record and publish chat logs and meeting minutes as written by a human scribe, allowing for corrections and improvements from other participants directly within the chat. The logs are then published on W3C's website, along with minutes based on the logs generated using scribe.perl. For more details see the RRSAgent repo on GitHub.

Zakim is primarily used for agenda and speaker queue management; sample session:

<ralphs> agenda+ minute-taker
* Zakim notes agendum 1 added 
<ralphs> agenda+ chair for next meeting
* Zakim notes agendum 2 added
<ralphs> zakim, agenda?
<zakim> I see 2 items remaining on the agenda:
<zakim> 1. minute-taker [from RalphS]
<zakim> 2. chair for next meeting [from RalphS]
<ralphs> zakim, take up next agendum
<zakim> agendum 1. "pick scribe" taken up [from RalphS]
<alice> q+
* Zakim sees Alice on the speaker queue
<bob> q+
* Zakim sees Alice, Bob on the speaker queue
<ralph> >Zakim, ack Alice
* Zakim sees Bob on the speaker queue

For a complete list of features and usage information please see the Zakim repo on GitHub.