Automatic Minutes Generation
draft-rescorla-auto-minutes-00
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| Document | Type | Active Internet-Draft (individual) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authors | Eric Rescorla , Martin Thomson , Suresh Krishnan , Richard Barnes | ||
| Last updated | 2025-10-07 | ||
| RFC stream | (None) | ||
| Intended RFC status | (None) | ||
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draft-rescorla-auto-minutes-00
Network Working Group E. Rescorla
Internet-Draft Knight-Georgetown Institute
Intended status: Informational M. Thomson
Expires: 10 April 2026 Mozilla
S. Krishnan
R. Barnes
Cisco
7 October 2025
Automatic Minutes Generation
draft-rescorla-auto-minutes-00
Abstract
RFC 2418 requires that working group chairs ensure that sessions
shall "be reported by making minutes available". Those minutes can
be automatically generated from meeting recordings. This document
requests that the IETF LLC update the meeting tooling to facilitate
this.
About This Document
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.
The latest revision of this draft can be found at
https://ekr.github.io/draft-rescorla-no-minutes/draft-rescorla-auto-
minutes.html. Status information for this document may be found at
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-rescorla-auto-minutes/.
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
https://github.com/ekr/draft-rescorla-no-minutes.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 10 April 2026.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2025 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Conventions and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Automating Minutes Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1. Introduction
Recorded minutes of meetings are an essential tool for documenting
the decisions reached at those meetings [YESMINISTER]:
It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions
that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every
member’s recollection of them differs violently from every other
member’s recollection. Consequently, we accept the convention
that the official decisions are those and only those which have
been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials
For this reason Section 3.1 of [RFC2418] duly requires that working
group sessions be minuted:
All working group sessions (including those held outside of the
IETF meetings) shall be reported by making minutes available.
These minutes should include the agenda for the session, an
account of the discussion including any decisions made, and a list
of attendees. The Working Group Chair is responsible for insuring
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that session minutes are written and distributed, though the
actual task may be performed by someone designated by the Working
Group Chair. The minutes shall be submitted in printable ASCII
text for publication in the IETF Proceedings, and for posting in
the IETF Directories and are to be sent to: [email protected]
Common practice in most WGs is for a volunteer WG participant to take
minutes. Predictably, this leads to suboptimal outcomes, with
volunteers struggling to keep up with the conversation and lack of
clarity about what precisely needs to be minuted (full narrative
minutes? just important points? just decisions?). This can be
evidenced by the varied level of details in the minutes of different
working groups in the proceedings.
Minute takers, especially those relatively new to the IETF, often
struggle to keep track of who is speaking. Moreover, being a minute
taker interferes with the ability to participate in discussions.
This results in marginalizing the participation of those who
volunteer and chairs often struggle to find minute takers for this
reason.
In the 25+ years since RFC 2418, the technical and operational
practices of the IETF have changed in ways that change the nature of
the minutes problem:
* Sessions are routinely video and audio recorded, with those
recordings posted publicly.
* The recordings are automatically transcribed.
* The speaker queue is managed via software, providing data to
support automated recognition of who is speaking.
* Agendas and minutes are managed via software tooling rather than
via humans reading email.
The combination of these changes makes it possible to produce
adequate minutes without requiring real-time note taking by a
participant in the meeting. This document describes some appropriate
practices and requests the IETF LLC to make the necessary updates to
the IETF datatracker to automate those practices.
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2. Conventions and Definitions
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
capitals, as shown here.
3. Automating Minutes Collection
RFC 2418 requires that minutes contain the following items:
* The agenda for the session
* A list of attendees
* An account of the discussion including any decisions made
In practice, chairs rarely submit the first two but they are already
stored in datatracker, but instead just submit the freeform minutes.
No change is needed for these.
As noted above, transcripts are already available and by definition
provide an account of the discussion and capture any decisions. This
document encourages chairs to use the transcript as the basis for
minutes.
The IETF LLC is requested to update the IETF tooling as follows to
facilitate automatic minutes creation, as follows:
* After the conclusion of the meeting, automatically retrieve the
transcript and make it available to the chairs as candidate
minutes. Chairs can either approve the minutes, correct or
annotate them as they see fit, and publish them.
* Make the automatically-generated transcript available for download
from the proceedings page in the datatracker.
* Augment the transcript generation function to add the speaker's
identity as determined by the state of the microphone queue (for
local participants) or the active speaker (for remote
participants).
In addition, there is a need for working group chair training to
ensure the consistency of minutes across working groups. i.e. The
chairs should manage the queue in such a manner that the head of the
queue accurately reflects the active speaker.
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4. Security Considerations
Because the transcript is automatically generated, an attacker might
attempt to produce input which would cause the transcript to
incorrectly reflect the actual meeting, via adversarial input attacks
[ADVERSARIALSPEECH]. This is mitigated by (1) having the chairs
review the transcript (2) the existence of session recordings which
can be directly reviewed.
5. IANA Considerations
This document has no IANA actions.
6. References
6.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119>.
[RFC2418] Bradner, S., "IETF Working Group Guidelines and
Procedures", BCP 25, RFC 2418, DOI 10.17487/RFC2418,
September 1998, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2418>.
[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174>.
6.2. Informative References
[ADVERSARIALSPEECH]
Carlini, N. and D. Wagner, "Audio Adversarial Examples:
Targeted Attacks on Speech-to-Text", IEEE Security and
Privacy Workshops , 2018.
[YESMINISTER]
Jay, A. and J. Lynn, "Man Overboard", Yes, Prime
Minister S2E1, 3 December 1987,
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074rwy>.
Authors' Addresses
Eric Rescorla
Knight-Georgetown Institute
Email: [email protected]
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Martin Thomson
Mozilla
Email: [email protected]
Suresh Krishnan
Cisco
Email: [email protected]
Richard Barnes
Cisco
Email: [email protected]
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