Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: knowing what committees do

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

> BM Vornbrock suggested:
What about the idea of a computer resource that let everyone in the community
dig through the minutes et al without having to read each bit?  A bit of
automated keyword indexing and useful search tools could help the information
overload situation you are describing.

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The Secretary for the NW Intentional Communities Association of which I 
am on the board of takes all the minutes on a portable computer, so 
text entry is done on the spot.  Retyping in minutes and creating 
systems for indexing take a fair amount of work to retro fit to 
existing material.  I have heard several communities talk about using 
databases for such things. Never seen it actually happen yet.

One thing I have seen is that often minutes get miss filed or taken.  I 
saw one system where the whole years minutes were assembled in order, 
and then in big red pen in upper corner the pages were numbered.  This 
way, just flipping thorugh the file it was easy to see which was out of 
order or missing and also easy to correct.  Same group of folks used 
colored highlight pen to mark out significant things such a decisions, 
etc.  Using this system it was very easy to scan a folder to find a 
particular decision. If the decision happened in the fall you looked in 
the last half of the file and searched for yellow highlights.