Meetings: Tiddlywiki Tools, Plugins, Editions

[Mohammad]

Is there any good resource for using Tiddlywiki for Meetings? I like to use it for meeting minutes.

Objective

• Having a template for meeting minutes
• Ability to export the report to html/pdf to be distributed to others for signing for example,…

Some resources

• Streams for note taking during meeting
• Shiraz quick table to create items/due/responsibility table

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Further Readings

Q: What should be included in meeting minutes? [1]

• A: What you include in meeting minutes ultimately depends on your specific meeting and goals. Here are a few things practically all minutes should have:
  • Name of the person taking notes
  • Organization name
  • Date and time
  • Meeting participants
  • Meeting purpose
  • Summaries of reports and announcements
  • Decisions made
  • Alternative actions/options discussed
  • Follow-up items, including agreed-on roles and responsibilities

Q: How do I write effective meeting minutes? [1]

• A: Write effective meeting minutes by including only the need-to-know items—the key points, needs, and opportunities underlying all the words. Exercising brevity and clarity is the best way to write useful meeting minutes because, by keeping things simple, you ensure people can and will actually use your minutes. Don’t be a slave to the template; use it as a guide, but exercise your expert judgement to determine what information people will need later.

Ref

[1] 7-Steps To Writing Clear & Concise Meeting Minutes + Template (snacknation.com)

[TW_Tones]

@Mohammad I have already given this a lot of thought. I think the value is to handle a rolling agenda over multiple meetings. I think tiddlywiki is idea for this. Some thoughts;

Workflow

• Agenda contributions
• Meeting notice built on agenda, including add to calendar, email notice tools
• In meeting
  • Meeting Notes - assigning people/teams
  • Generating minutes
    • Resulting tasks and decisions
    • Allow feedback and new agenda from assignees
• Obtain progress, new items and standing items
• Generate a new agenda online or email
• and as they say “rinse and repeat”

I think the best way to achieve this is to build an evolving system based on the needs that arise in real meetings.

• As you suggest we need to provide clear information and tools to the users so minutes are minimal and meaningful.
• Letting everyone see the minutes as they are taken, or immediately after, also allows immediate feedback and sets expectations.
• Cumulative data collection will build a meetings tool that only improves.
• After time we would have the tools even so one off meetings have effective tools available.

I think the templates should be for the items on the agenda and in the meeting, with the wiki just giving the simple and easy workflow tools. 80% of the functionality is similar to “get things done solutions” focused around a particular set of issues and responsibilities, and re-occuring tasks

• There are also powerful check listing methods that are designed to guarantee items are addressed, however minimise the number of items that need to be read.

[Springer]

Mohammad, I used TiddlyWiki for all aspects of running a major committee at the university, including meeting agendas, minutes, and all related electronic resources and notes.

One challenge (and tiddly-ripe opportunity, so long as you plan in advance) is that one wants to “slice” the data in different ways for different purposes.

As appropriate “granular” tiddlers, I decided on the intersection of issue and meeting-date (roughly corresponding to “appearance of a particular item on one meeting’s agenda”). In other words, the summary tiddler for any given meeting was full of transcluded sections. Although notes for the Sept 15 meeting (say) were not all residing in one tiddler, each week after the meeting I would generate an archival minutes tiddler (since that’s an institutional requirement), with the string of item-specific notes “frozen in place” formatted, etc.). It was important to “bake in” the text of the official minutes, since I might later want to add something to my notes, or fix some detail, without thereby automatically changing the official notes (which could not be done without a formal process).

Within any specific “issue x date” tiddler, fields tracked various things that I might want to access later. For matters officially voted on, it made sense to “fieldify” things like “motion-made” (specifying the wording of the motion), plus “vote-tally”. That way it was easy to make a dynamic table later, specifically summarizing all matters that were put to a vote. There could also be an “assigned-to-AB” field for each meeting participant, so that action items could be retrieved and summarized easily. (In practice, I did not handle others’ tasks in this field-specific way, but it was helpful in making my own upcoming tasks, plus a retrospective year-end summary of them, easy to glance over.)

Since issues would often have a multi-meeting arc of discussion, a different meta-tiddler (with dynamic table) would track handling of This Proposal or That Complaint. These could be sorted by “most recent update on top” or as chronological progression from first to last handling of issue.

Additional tiddler-nodes are useful for committee-members (with roles, end-date of committee participation, contact info, etc.) and for any procedural documents that need to be easily referenced during the meeting. I also ran the meeting (over zoom) out of the same wiki, so there were tiddlers with detailed info to be shared and discussed during the meeting. Since I had the historical archive of prior committee work in the same wiki, I occasionally had a chance to show off a live search that made it seem like everything was always at my fingertips… which it mostly was, thanks to TiddlyWiki.

I’d love to see a community template for agendas, meeting notes, and minutes.

-Springer

[Mohammad]

Thank you @Springer for detailed explanation and real use cases.

I will share here my progress! Now I am collecting comments, ideas and opinions on having a Tiddlywiki template for meeting notes.