Taking Notes for Social Web CG taskforce meetings
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Hi all,
I've recently had some questions about what tool to use for note taking during taskforce meetings, personally I've been using hedgedoc from social.coop, but it's a private instance and you need an invited account. I've also used hackmd in the past. I've seen other taskforces use Google Docs, and I think one even used CryptPad.
Officially the W3C way of scribing meetings is via an IRC bot: https://www.w3.org/2006/tools/wiki/WebExBestPractices#Meeting_Record_(Minutes)
However, this isn't necessarily the most approachable to many members of the Social Web CG.
At the end of the day, the most important part is that taskforce leads capture meeting notes and preserve them, e.g., in the taskforce github repository on swicg or swicg/meetings. (I could also automate taskforce to swicg/meetings sync)
I currently own the socialcg.org and swicg.org domains, and I'd be happy to spin up a hedgedoc server on a subdomain there that taskforce leads can use for creating and taking meeting notes. However, to do this I'd need to figure out some funding for it (not particularly a lot, but some amount of money — somewhere in the range of €60-180 a year, I'd guess).
What tooling would you like to use for taking meeting notes? Would having a hedgedoc install for the CG be valuable?
(I am also in the process of hosting the Activity Summary Bot on a VPS, which produces these emails to the mailing list weekly: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2025Oct/0028.html — it was running on github actions but kept failing there due to GitHub restrictions, so I've had a VPS on a server sponsored by one of the large fediverse hosts to replace GitHub Actions for more reliable delivery)
Yours,
Emelia -
julian since you asked!
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I'll need a bit more than upvotes here
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thisismissem hah yeah, I was doing dinnertime and didn't have the bandwidth to answer, one sec
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thisismissem hedgedoc or hackMD worked surprisingly well. Before I had a Google Docs sheet and participation was low because of the access control barriers.
I would not be opposed to an AI scribe, and I actually have access to one with my Google Workspace sub, but I think that comes with a lot of baggage that precludes its use.
The worst part of scribing your own notes is that you can't participate. All my notes for sections I lead don't ever get captured fully, and I have to do it post-meeting... about half the time it doesn't happen at all
As mentioned offline, perfectly fine to use dmitri@social.coop's HedgeDoc instance.
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Yeah, in the past I've gained consent to record a call & use a local model to transcribe which I then edited, but it was time consuming.
In the T&S taskforce grant I've applied for money to pay a scribe for their time
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I think I'll give it a try. I did some light research and am going to give Whisper.cpp and some Ollama models a try. I'm not sure whether they'll have the ability to summarize and distinguish voices, but let's see... I'll report back in this thread.
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I have been informed that there is an (outdated?) Etherpad instance at https://pad.w3.org that you authenticate with via Basic Auth using your W3C Account credentials. Unfortunately it needs that auth just to view or contribute to documents, which probably isn't helpful.
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Okay, I spent the better part of an hour playing around with it (after compiling
whisper.cppand going down a weird rabbit hole — thanks Gemini!)I recorded some test audio, had it transcribed, and passed it over to ollama running llama3.1, with a prompt to summarize the meeting into bullet points and action items. It seemed to go over well, although I don't quite know how it will handle digressions, asides, and hour-long meetings
It might be we can adjust the prompt so that it isn't summarizing so much as efficiently condensing meeting discussions.
Definitely worth a shot if only to reduce the burden of scribing while chairing a meeting!
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Okay, I spent the better part of an hour playing around with it (after compiling
whisper.cppand going down a weird rabbit hole — thanks Gemini!)I recorded some test audio, had it transcribed, and passed it over to ollama running llama3.1, with a prompt to summarize the meeting into bullet points and action items. It seemed to go over well, although I don't quite know how it will handle digressions, asides, and hour-long meetings
It might be we can adjust the prompt so that it isn't summarizing so much as efficiently condensing meeting discussions.
Definitely worth a shot if only to reduce the burden of scribing while chairing a meeting!
julian I used vibe.app when I did transcription, and it kinda butcher audience a few months ago and "fediverse" became like "fetty verse", but otherwise was okay.
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Whisper.cpp is surprisingly good. It is getting 99% of it... missing things it doesn't know about (like
PyFETinstead of Piefed), but it definitely knows what activitypub is, so that's handy.Thanks for pushing me (even if indirectly) to do this. Looking forward to trying it out for real.
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Okay, I've setup https://notes.socialcg.org/about
