Having just suffered through some activities that were not a good use of my time, I decided to pen this tongue-in-cheek Profile about Meetings.
While this was created for entertainment purposes, some have suggested that it can be used as a fun guide of some of the items to consider when creating an xAPI Profile.
- initialized
- started the meeting
- note that this may need several timestamps eg the meeting scheduled start time(SST), actual start time(AST) and effective start time(EST) may all be quite distantly related. We recommend the use of ISO8601 timestamps because
- time zones are a bitch
- nobody gets them right
- the SST, AST and EST may come in any order so relative timestamps are not reliable
- adjourned
- proposed a motion that the meeting should end
- not used to indicate the actual end of the meeting
- often has related unnecessary Verbs such as 'seconded' or unrelated discussion ('sidebarred')
- terminated
- meeting ended unexpectedly, not as scheduled
- this may be a good thing eg an early finish, but this is more often an indicator of poor agenda setting or planning
- completed
- meeting ended in expected fashion, as scheduled, with all action items accounted for
- this is a very rare activity and deserves its own Verb
- proposed
- putting forward a motion, seemingly to support an issue, but with the real intention of getting the proposer's name documented in the minutes
- seconded
- similar to proposed but Actor was not quite so swift off the mark
- voted
- declaration in support of or against a proposed motion
- not the same as 'decided', which would be the cause of some future action or activity. 'decided' is a very rare occurrence in meetings and has not been included in this Profile. See other Vocabularies for this definition - try Fiction.
- third-spaced
- mind off in another zone (Twilight?), which may or may not be productive.
- Seen more in those with ADHD
- minuted
- recorded in the minutes as a brief observation
- houred
- rambled on at length, consuming many minutes about some trivial item in the minutes
- dazed
- resulting soporific activity in other committee members who have been 'houred'
- bingoed
- time spent on amusing activity that is tangentially related to the meeting process or content eg. buzzword bingo, poke-the-pope (Pope in this case being one who has a tendency to pontificate; activity relates to lobbing the "Pope" a seemingly innocuous question designed to trigger a pontification)
- obfuscated
- time spent intentionally clouding an issue (reverse-clarification)
- sidebarred
- time spent on non-amusing activity that is tangentially related to the meeting process or content eg. grumbling about how the Chair cannot keep the meeting to order
- not part of the main conversational thread
- whittered
- rambled on at length, consuming many minutes about some topic that has nothing to do with the current meeting
- not to be confused with houred, sidebarred or bingoed
- http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Whitter
- robertsed
- used Robert's Rules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert%27s_Rules_of_Order )to try to force a change in meeting flow
- includes calls to order, points of procedure
- usually does not conform to real Robert's Rules, just to the Actor's imagined interpretation of them
- blackberried
- use of a computing device for an activity that is tangentially related to the meeting process or content
- often hard to distinguish from activities that are completely unrelated to the meeting topic (do we need a separate Verb for this?)
- Object clause in statement should also describe effects on meeting process eg. how disruptive it was to other participants (it is assumed that the attention of the Actor is pretty much a goner at this point)
- jangled
- disrupted course of the meeting through inappropriate settings or behaviour with a computing device eg loud ring tone, phone conversation interrupting the meeting process, inability to turn off alarm or message alert tones, sound track from inappropriate YouTube video.
- often related to blackberried
- telebarged
- intruded into course of meeting process by remote communications from off-site
- may be inadvertent/indirect eg. those helpful announcements that 'a participant has joined the conference' or 'the meeting ends in 10 minutes'
- may be third-party eg unmuted microphone, dog barking in background
- may be result of poor mobile signal causing repeated disconnects