Project Control Center Committee Meeting Management FAQ

MEETING AND COMMITTEE MANAGEMENT FAQ

  1. PCC MEETING MANAGEMENT

What is changing?

  • Prior to PCC Meeting Management, LF staff used PCC to provision project-dedicated Zoom user accounts to run meetings. The staff or community leaders who have the email and password to these Zoom user logins have full, direct access to schedule meetings natively via Zoom.

  • With PCC Meeting Management, instead of issuing and being given access to a specific Zoom account, an authorized staff member or community leader on any project is able to schedule recurring or one-time meetings directly in PCC, and those meetings will be hosted out of a pool of LFX Meeting Zoom accounts.

NEW FEATURE BENEFITS
Schedule meetings in PCC Meeting management
  • Delegate meeting management out to the community at any level: umbrella, project, sub-project
  • Capture attendance metrics which can be shared with community and member stakeholders
  • Automatic attendee synchronization with defined project committees
  • You no longer have to invite people individually to a meeting, and can invite important groups via their committee
  • Centralize all of your meeting activities in PCC
  • Make changes to meeting times
  • Monitor your meeting attendance
  • Emails ICS events to each attendee letting them use their preferred calendaring platform like Microsoft Outlook, Google or Apple Calendars.
  • Share access to recordings and transcripts
  • Coming soon: Attach pre-meeting materials

  • Note: ICS (Internet Calendar Scheduling) is a universal calendar format used by most email and calendar programs to enable users to publish and share calendar information on the web and over email.
  • Eliminate separate Project Zoom accounts
  • Moving to a shared pool of Zoom accounts eliminates the need for projects to pay for their individual Zoom accounts, resulting in a significant decrease in cost
  • New and unfunded projects now have access to Zoom accounts
  • Improved meeting security
  • Each meeting uses unique, per-attendee join codes to reduce the chances of Zoom bombing
  • > How have meeting participants previously been invited to meetings?

    • Prior to PCC Meeting Management, meetings (with shared joining instructions for everyone) were usually listed on a shared calendar. Individuals could subscribe to the shared calendar, or receive an invite when they joined a connected mailing list.

    What are the benefits for meeting participants?

    • By leveraging Zoom’s registration system for PCC-scheduled meetings, each participant has their own calendar event in their personal or work calendar and contains unique, personal instructions for how to join by web or phone.
    • Participants are NOT required to log in with LF SSO to join the meeting, as their unique registration join info is already associated with their LF SSO identity. For recurring meetings, if an participant’s personal calendar details are leaked, they can be issued a new join link—it doesn’t impact any other participants.

    > How can a meeting participant be positive that they have the correct time for a meeting?

    • (Coming Soon!) Users will have access to view their own calendar in LFX Individual Dashboard where they can see all meetings where they are a registered participant, and re-download ICS files for their preferred calendaring platform.

    What is happening to the existing PCC provisioned Zoom Accounts?

    • Existing PCC-provisioned Zoom accounts (including those provisioned from the earlier “ITX” tool) will continue to operate during the transition time.

    > What about Webinars?

    • A similar experience for Webinars is planned in a future version, but for this time, there is no change to how projects run webinars. Projects should continue to utilize “legacy” PCC-provisioned Zoom accounts for webinars. Projects without any legacy Zoom accounts will not see the legacy Zoom screen in PCC, and should contact support to request an account.

    What is the best way to transition to Meeting Management in PCC?

    • Begin to replace your project’s meeting series with LFX/PCC one at a time.
    • If you have multiple recurring meetings, we recommend that you start with a smaller meeting on your project and plan to cut over a few weeks to a month out depending on the frequency of your meetings.
    • Update the existing shared calendar event (on Google, Groups.io, etc.) so it ends prior to your cut-over, and note on the meeting description that join links will change on/after the date chosen.
    • Include a note on the meeting description that that join links will change on/after the date chosen.
    • Then, schedule the PCC meeting in advance to start AFTER the other meetings have happened. Over the coming weeks, review your meeting participants in PCC to look for ones marked “Registration Pending”. You can remind them of the need to register in the following meetings that are still on the old join URLs, and make sure people are seeing the continued, new meeting events in their calendar after the cut-over date.

    Which Zoom features do we have access to in PCC?

    We are targeting common, broadly-used ways people use Zoom accounts for meetings. Here is a current list:

    • Allow join before host, up to 10 minutes prior to start time
    • Recording: is on by default and can be disabled in-meeting by a host, or disabled for a meeting in PCC. Visibility of the recording link to just PCC admins, registered participants for the meeting occurrence (through the Individual Dashboard), or the public can be configured in PCC.
    • Transcripts: At this time, we only support native Zoom transcripts. These can be enabled or disabled in PCC, and when enabled, follow the same sharing settings as the recording. (A preview/edit/publish workflow is on the roadmap for 2022.)
    • Streaming: streaming will be enabled to all Zoom-supported providers (including the “custom provider”), and is started/configured in-meeting by a host.

    How do I let attendees know if the Meeting has been changed or canceled?

    • When you change or remove a meeting in PCC, all participants will receive a new email from Zoom describing the change, and those who are registered (have an LFID) receive a calendar event “update” that will change or remove the event from their calendar. Their personal joining instructions for the meeting will not change, and they do not need to re-register.

    Will I have access to log in directly to the Zoom account that is hosting my meeting?

    • No, the Zoom accounts (user logins) are managed programmatically by the LFX Platform only.

    > Can I share meeting materials with meeting participants?

    • Yes. You can include links in your meeting description to let attendees know where to go to find posted materials or meeting meetings. Support for pre-meeting and post-meeting attachments is on the roadmap.

    Since multiple projects will be sharing the same Zoom accounts, is it possible to accidentally join the wrong meeting, or to block a meeting from starting?

    • No. All meetings require unique meeting/attendee join URLs, and attendees will only be allowed to join a meeting up to 10 minutes prior to its scheduled time, so it is not possible to accidentally crash the wrong meeting.

    Are there any time limitations when setting up Zoom meetings?

    • Meetings can be scheduled for a duration of up to 10 hours in PCC which affects the duration of the corresponding calendar event, and will have a grace period of 40 minutes after their scheduled end time. If the meeting is still running after the 40 minute grace period, it will be automatically ended to ensure the “line” is free for the next scheduled meeting.

    > How does this affect pricing for Projects?

    • Today, projects with Zoom users have a fixed cost per Zoom user (aka “account”), and projects with concurrent meetings may have several of these users. Extra capacity on these users is “wasted”. With LFX Meetings and the pooled-account

    Be sure to let us know if you have any questions regarding committees and meeting in PCC :slight_smile:

    1 Like

    Hello @PMO Team:

    As you review this FAQ, don’t be shy about asking your questions for how to reconcile meetings and committees in PCC.

    Thanks Henry and Jen. Do we know when the various features of meeting tracking will be available? For example, tracking attendance, toggling the recording option, and accessing recordings?

    1 Like

    You’re very welcome @Brian_Warner. Unfortunately, I do not have an estimated ETA for when these features will be released.

    I do know our product team has been working on the recording and transcript feature this month and undergoing testing. The feature should be rolled out with the data lake update, which is also currently being developed and tested.

    I’ll be sure to update the community when this rolls out.

    1 Like

    Hi Brian:

    We have weekly check in’s with the product team and will discuss with them this week on getting an updated roadmap.

    Jen

    Hi @Brian_Warner regarding PCC timelines, ETA for recording & transcripts should be early next month. With other updates the next 2 to 3 months of our “beta” launch of meetings such as including an individual calendar within LFX Individual Dashboard, and continuing to fix bugs and edge cases as they come across.

    1 Like

    Is there formal documentation that you can point me to for PCC Committee Meeting Management? I’d like to do some testing of a few scenarios and would like to reference the documentation in advance along with understand what features are currently available (plus roadmap timeline on items noted above such as access for community members, recordings, attendance tracking). Thank you.

    1 Like

    Hello @jzcardoso welcome to the community :slight_smile: .

    Here’s a link to our documentation on meeting management for PCC: Meeting Management - Linux Foundation Documentation

    If you have any other questions feel free to ask anytime.

    1 Like

    Great, thanks for the link!

    1 Like

    My pleasure! And if you do have any other questions regarding meeting management you can always ask here :slight_smile:

    1 Like

    Hi, I have a funny story and a question. I used the Meeting Management tool for the first time with the Marketing Committee on one of my projects. But, we have a Slack bot that posts the Zoom URL 15 minutes in advance. So I Slack’ed “don’t use that Zoom link, use this one:” and posted the one from my calendar. As a result, several folks joined and all of them showed up as me! Moral of the story is don’t share your personal zoom link with anyone. And my question is, for a public meeting (which this was), where can I find the public Zoom link to share and for updating the Slack bot?

    I looked on the documentation and didn’t see anything about the scenario of how to share a public meeting URL. Did I miss something?

    1 Like

    Hi, where do I submit bug reports on the Meeting Management tool? I think I have one to report.

    Hi @Neal_Caidin, that is a funny story,

    One thing to note– when an invitee receives the invitation, they will see this message at the bottom of the invitation, asking them to use the generated link and not forward the email. Doing so will have this attendee show up twice.

    PCC is coming up with an update very shortly that will enable us to grab a share meeting link from the meeting management portal.

    image

    To submit bugs create a support ticket here:
    msedge_Vctd6ka9zk

    2 Likes

    Cool. All of this is very helpful. Thank you!

    2 Likes

    My pleasure! @Neal_Caidin