Subject: [Tools-discuss] Improvements in meeting agenda page

From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2017 10:39:16 -0400

Looking at the meeting agenda page for IETF-98:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/98/agenda.html

For each WG meeting, there is a line in the meeting agenda.  At the
right end of the line, there is a sequence of six(!) icons.  The tooltip
texts of the icons are (left to right):

    1. Show meeting materials
    2. Download meeting materials as .tar archive
    3. Download meeting materials as PDF file
    4. Etherpad for note-takers
    5. Jabber logs for [WG name]
    6. Meetecho session recording

The first icon is not a proper link.  If one clicks on it in the default
manner, an overlay frame is put up containing the meeting materials.
But if one tries to use an alternative click to "open link in new tab",
the operation fails.

My understanding is that one can construct a link that makes both of
these behaviors work, and I think that would be a desirable improvement.

Also, the "meeting materials" presented by clicking on the first icon
are not the same as the "meeting materials" presented by clicking on the
second and third icons.

For example, for the TSVWG meeting late on Monday, the first icon
produces the agenda and links to the slides of the presentations.
However, icons 2 and 3 retrieve bundles of I-Ds.  The two sets of
"meeting materials" are disjoint!

I think it would be a substantial improvement if all three links were to
retrieve the same content (in the current formats).  Or, if it would be
difficult to bundle the agenda/slides with the drafts, the two groups of
content should be given distinctive names.

Comparing these with the "Meeting Materials" page,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/98/materials:

The Meeting Materials page entry for tsvwg has links to more slides
files than icon 1 has, but the additional slides are probably for the
second TSVWG session.

The entry has a "No drafts" item, which is clearly incorrect.

I think it would be an improvement if the Meeting Materials page entry
listed the same bundle of I-Ds as the agenda page.  (I assume that all
of these groups of meeting materials are automagically generated from
the same directory of files somewhere in the datatracker.)

Yours truly,

Dale

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2017 19:46:53 +0200

Hi Dale,

Points taken, and ack on it being possible to improve things.  However:

> the same directory of files somewhere in the datatracker.)

And this assumption doesn't actually hold.  A year or two ago we only had
the list of drafts extracted by regex from the agenda.  This list is
reflected in the drafts packaged in the tarball and pdf package.  More
recently we added the ability for chairs to add links between a draft and
a meeting session, which not only lets us show the lists of drafts on the
materials page, but also show the sessions on which a draft is on the agenda
(see for instance the 'On Agenda' entry of draft-ietf-codec-ambisonics on
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-codec-ambisonics/).

However, this draft-to-session information is only present in the database
if the chairs add the information to the datatracker.

Having taken the step of introducing associations between draft objects
and session objects in the database, one possible next step is to auto-
populate these from agendas.  Some feedback from chairs would be appreciated
on whether doing that would be good, but anything that can reduce the
discrepancy between the various sets of drafts associated with a session
would (I think) be an improvement.

We try to release early, release often, but that will occasionally show
gaps between new features constructed in one way (database links between
drafts and sessions) and earlier features constructed a different way
(tarball built from names extracted from the agenda text).

So I'll not apologise for the gaps -- they are inevitable.  We'll try to
continue to fill them and improve things, though :-)

Best regards,

	Henrik

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From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2017 11:31:31 -0400

Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]> writes:
> And this assumption doesn't actually hold.  [...]

> if the chairs add the information to the datatracker.

My approach would be to get the chairs to enter clean data.  Even to the
point of giving them a directory into which to put what they want to
show up in the agenda et al.  There's no hope for software to Do The
Right Thing unless it's got good input data.

Then again, I haven't had to convince chairs to enter this data in a
timely manner...

Thanks for considering this,

Dale