Tags for meeting minutes

This page was written by me (MichaelCorbett) as a result of my experience of participating in some of the TWiki marketing meetings and of writing up the minutes for the most recent meeting. I am a newcomer to the world of holding meetings via IRC but I am also a firm believer in process and structure and observes that things go better on TWiki when there is structure to follow (an Example of this is the WebPageAudience page). I also find difficulty in following IRC meetings and I believe that others must experience the same. As an experiment I suggest having seven different tags for information in the minutes. This sounds like a lot but each one has a purpose, as follows:

• Info: Information that was presented in the meeting
• Background: Information that wasn’t presented in the meeting but adds context for people who did not attend.
• Issue: A problem that the meeting must resolve.
• Decision: A decision was made in the meeting
• Action: The meeting identified that something must be done and (hopefully) identifies someone to carry out the action.
• Talk: An issue was talked over but no decision was made nor action agreed. (But it is important to preserve some of the talk since it can be referenced in the next meeting and also is available to those who did not participate in the meeting.)
• FixMe: The minute taker got a bit confused at this point and apologises if he’s missed anything. This tag is an invite for others to edit this page and supply the missing information.

These tags are used both in the IRC chat and in the minutes. Preparing the minutes could then be as simple as scanning down the IRC log and including everything that was tagged. Anything that's not tagged doesn't get into the minutes. Period. That forces us to tag things in IRC which in turn forces us to focus on the output of the IRC meeting in the meeting. In other words, it's keeping us focussed on the output. (The only exception to this is the FixMe tag. This is used where the poor minute taker got a bit confused and realises that, although a certain point isn't tagged in the IRC log that it certainly deserves to be in the minutes. Everyone is human - even minute takers!)

As an example, the minute taker may tags something as "Decision: Everyone to contribute to SomePageOrOther by the next meeting". Discussion could then stop within IRC (and the meeting use the time to discuss something else) or someone could flag up the fact that they don't agree that's the decision that the meeting came to. Better to do it then than after the minutes have been produced.

More work for the minute taker during the meeting; less work after.

Something I realised after writing this page: This idea is a bit like WikiBadges except for the fact that these meeting tags are not in Camel case.

A very important note: this is just an experiment (prompted by my minor frustration with participating in a meeting via IRC) and I am certainly not forcing it on anyone. I will, of course, take the minutes until the experiment is over.

These are the first (and possibly only!) minutes written up using this system.

-- Contributors: MichaelCorbett - 07 Oct 2007

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