Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: a question about meeting minutes

[R Philip Dowds (rpdowds]

Good question.  My answer may not be the most popular one, but …

When I do minutes, I do not try to provide court transcripts; I don’t have the 
training or the equipment, and in any event, modern audio recording devices 
often do that as well or better than a typist.

The bigger issue, however, is that in court proceedings, the dialogs and 
exchanges follow a vigorously regulated ritual.  The “conversation” has its own 
forced logic and structure, which makes it easy (easier) for non-participants 
to decode later.  Maybe your plenary meetings are better organized than mine, 
but the discussions of my meetings don’t have that much structure:  Topics or 
questions pop up, then disappear beneath the waves, and then re-surface again.  
Or not.  One remark is contradicted by another 10 minutes later, but the 
conflict is not addressed.  Important information is available, but there’s no 
time to review it.  People repeat themselves.  The facilitator’s attempt to 
summarize the conclusion accidentally omits an important point.  And so on.

In my view, a linear transcript of such an event is pretty much useless.  So 
instead, I write “sense of the meeting” minutes.  If (in my note taking 
opinion) there were three issues on the floor — two of which were resolved, one 
of which was not — then I will structure the minutes around these three issues. 
 Basically, my structure is (a) a clear statement of the matter being discussed 
(which may not be evident until late in the conversation); (b) a summary of the 
conversational highlights; and (c) a clear statement of the next steps or 
outcome (if any).  For the highlights, I include either paraphrases or (less 
often) literal quotes, with quotation marks.  In some cases, I’ll provide an 
attribution to a specific person, but in other cases, I will anoni-mize a 
comment, with an attribution like “one member thought …”; I do this latter when 
it’s a comment I fear the member might regret at a future time.

So my minutes are not a transcript, they are an interpretation.  The job of the 
notetaker is not that of stenographer.  The notetaker’s job is to make the 
meeting sound better than it was.  Needless to say, with an approach like this, 
I always send round a draft of the minutes, and seek comments.  Sometimes I get 
a few, and when I do, I always find a way to work them into my text.

To be candid … my community does have notetakers who are more like 
stenographers, and some of them are pretty good.  We’ve never tried to 
standardize our notes.  Should we?

Philip Dowds
Cornerstone Village Cohousing
Cambridge, MA

> On Sep 8, 2015, at 11:19 PM, Muriel Kranowski <murielk [at] vt.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> I often take the minutes at our plenary meetings, and my minutes provide
> nearly verbatim accounts of what was said in the course of a discussion.
> 
> I omit irrelevant and repetitive remarks and might simplify to a degree
> what each person said, but it's still a fairly detailed record of the
> meeting. My goal is that people not at the meeting, and people reading the
> minutes years later, will have a good understanding of the concerns and the
> issues and how they were addressed at that meeting, as well as the outcome
> if a decision was made.
> 
> My question is, for those of you who take those kinds of minutes, do you
> cite who said each comment, or just show the comments? (Or if you don't do
> it yourself, if it's done this way in your community.)
> 
> I have gone back and forth on this, sometimes thinking that the shyer
> people shouldn't feel constrained by knowing their name will be attached to
> all their remarks, and other times thinking that part of the record is who
> said what.
> 
> I would love to know how you handle this and if there's anything
> controversial about however you do it, in your community.
>    Muriel at Shadowlake Village, Blacksburg, VA
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