Internet-Draft Auto Miutes October 2025
Rescorla, et al. Expires 10 April 2026 [Page]
Workgroup:
Network Working Group
Internet-Draft:
draft-rescorla-auto-minutes-00
Published:
Intended Status:
Informational
Expires:
Authors:
E. Rescorla
Knight-Georgetown Institute
M. Thomson
Mozilla
S. Krishnan
Cisco
R. Barnes
Cisco

Automatic Minutes Generation

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.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on 10 April 2026.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Recorded minutes of meetings are an essential tool for documenting the decisions reached at those meetings [YESMINISTER]:

For this reason Section 3.1 of [RFC2418] duly requires that working group sessions be minuted:

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:

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.

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:

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:

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.

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, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119>.
[RFC2418]
Bradner, S., "IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures", BCP 25, RFC 2418, DOI 10.17487/RFC2418, , <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, , <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 , .
[YESMINISTER]
Jay, A. and J. Lynn, "Man Overboard", Yes, Prime Minister S2E1, , <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074rwy>.

Authors' Addresses

Eric Rescorla
Knight-Georgetown Institute
Martin Thomson
Mozilla
Suresh Krishnan
Cisco
Richard Barnes
Cisco