Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: approval of plenary minutes

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Aug 9, 2022, at 12:04 PM, Maraiah (Lynn) Nadeau <welcome [at] olympus.net> 
> wrote:
> 
> At the end of the full minutes, I put “Notes by Maraiah, reviewed by [Helen, 
> Pete, and Kathy].” I then publish the minutes via email, post also on google 
> docs, and put a paper copy in a notebook in the common house.

I think including the names of those who reviewed them is a good thing and 
might help resolve another problem — the minutes being posted so late that they 
do not serve one of their main functions which is to notify the community of 
any decisions the team has made before they are implemented.

One practice is to post the minutes to the attendees with the note, please send 
corrections by [Tuesday] or I will assume you approve. That way the minutes are 
not held up because 2 people haven’t had time to read their email for a week or 
two. They have no objections, they just didn’t respond. When reading minutes 
that are 2 months old, it can be hard to reorient yourself in time.

Listing the names of those who did approve is information that might be useful. 
If I know [Harry] read and approved, I might not question something related to 
[Harry]. He has said it is okay.

Having a long time secretary is assurance that the summaries are understood by 
everyone. If the secretary changes every year, the summaries may not be 
reflective. I wouldn’t want to approve minutes by only hearing the summary — 
the poster said the summary is read in the meeting when the minutes are 
approved.

Some of our note takes had started listing the decisions at the top of the 
minutes. What happened was that some decisions would be listed and others not. 
Did that mean only the ones at the top were really decided? Were the others 
just probables?

Decisions not to do something were also not listed at the top as decisions and 
those could be equally relevant to other members. If something had been on a 
team’s list of to-do's for months (years?) and suddenly disappeared that would 
be news to the members of the community who were waiting for the team to make a 
decision.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org