4 Where to look yourself, and why a draft report is not the last word

4.1 The five files

Every 3GPP plenary leaves the same five things in one public folder ^[1]. This is the order worth opening them in.

P1. The agenda — the deadlines, the 23 agenda items, the time plan and the meeting's own rules ^[2]

P2. The document list — every document under its agenda item, with its type, its sender and its result. The fastest single page there is ^[3]

P3. The draft report — the secretary's account, agenda item by agenda item, with annexes listing the documents, the attendees, the letters and the approved change requests ^[4]

P4. The documents themselves — one zip file per document number ^[1]

P5. The welcome pack — what the chair tells a first-time delegate about where all of the above lives ^[5]

The agenda is worth one extra minute even when you are not attending. It carries the deadlines, the hour-by-hour time plan and the meeting's own rules on how to request a document number SP-260361 — which is to say, it explains why a document exists at all before you go looking at what happened to it.

4.2 Eight things this record cannot tell you

L1. It is a draft. The report is version 0.0.5 and its cover says "Status: Draft - for comment". Nothing in it is final, confirmed or official, and the right form of words is "the draft report of the meeting records that…" ^[4]

L2. The chair's final notes are not in it. They are published after the meeting closes, and nothing here says what they contain ^[2]

L3. Not every document gets a paragraph. Of the 346 documents ^[6], 284 get one ^[7]; for the other 62 the only evidence is a row in an annex table

L4. It contradicts itself in at least one place. The narrative says the previous meeting's report was approved while the status line under the same document says "Not concluded." Report both, or neither ^[8]

L5. It has not been proof-read. The chair's surname appears as both "Jaine" and "Jain" in the same file ^[9]

L6. There are no vote counts and no reasons. One objection is named in the whole report ^[10] and nothing is said about anybody else's position, so no decision here may be called unanimous, widely supported or controversial

L7. Approved is not published. Each of the 26 specifications and reports approved here ^[11] still has to be produced and put on the server, and this data does not say when

L8. A machine-written summary of this meeting exists and is not evidence. A language model wrote it ^[12], along with 224 summaries of individual documents ^[13]. Cite it as a summary, never as the source of a decision

4.3 What you can now do

Four sentences, and you are reading a plenary properly:

• Name the document number, and check whether a later number replaced it.

• Quote the status word the record uses, not a friendlier one.

• Say which count you mean when two exist — 689 change requests by one method, 673 by another ^[14].

• Say that the report is a draft.

4.4 Where to go next

• The overview course of this track walks the same meeting in seven chapters: the agenda item by item, all ten status words, the two long arguments and what the release numbers say.

• The meeting folder holds the agenda, the report and one zip file per document, exactly as 3GPP publishes them ^[1]

• The document list answers any question of the form "what happened to SP-2606…?" ^[3]

• The sources page of this course lists every entry cited here, each with the file or database row it was read from.

This course has no specification behind it, so there is no clause map, no glossary and no version history to go with it. It can name a specification — TS 23.501, the 5G system architecture, took 29 change requests at this meeting TS 23.501 — and point at it, and that is all.