[uf-discuss] meeting minutes: microformats needed?

[Tantek Ç elik]

Welcome "brush"!

As someone who has typed up (and published) *numerous) meeting minutes
himself, I certainly recognize that this could be a useful microformat.

Regarding creating a new microformat, please read the following pages
thoroughly:

 http://microformats.org/wiki/process
 http://microformats.org/wiki/examples

Then, start the respective examples page:

 http://microformats.org/wiki/meeting-minutes-examples

and let folks on the list know that you have done so, and invite others to
help document and analyze the examples.

If you want to capture your brainstorms (e.g. your "sense is that it could
be as follows"), please do so on a brainstorming page, but keep in mind that
you will need to research and document real world examples on the Web and
pre-existing formats in order to give the brainstorms a good foundation, and
that as a result of that research, the proposals will likely change.

 http://microformats.org/wiki/meeting-minutes-brainstorms

Finally, if you have any questions about the process, or how to proceed,
please ask on the list, and I'm sure someone will help you move things
along.

Thanks,

Tantek


On 5/3/06 3:29 AM, "brush" <brush at tryonfarm.org> wrote:

> hello all,
> 
> i have been perusing the wiki and related material recently with great
> interest.
> 
> as a very brief introduction, i am involved in developing processes and
> relationships to facilitate decentralized organization of a social
> economy, or "open source" economy if you will, here in portland, or.  my
> orientation to virtual tools to that end is to maximize smooth
> emergence and functioning of real-world networks and communities.
> 
> i have been needing, then thinking about, and now working on a solution
> to a relatively large source of unnecessarily "wasted" labor: meeting
> minutes that are duly typed up (and sometimes posted to the web), but
> with no semantic content.
> 
> meetings, for many organizations, are a deep source of meaning and
> structure.  most particularly: decisions from meetings form the backbone
> of an organization's history and memory (not mention legal process), and
> action items from meetings (especially in less hierarchical
> organizations) often form the core mechanism of delegating collaborative
> labor and ensuring follow-through.
> 
> properly marked-up meeting minutes would allow a fairly simple web app
> to automatically notify interested parties of relevant decisions
> (including in "proposal" form), to add "to-do" items to personal lists,
> and to provide archives that could be transected and analyzed in a great
> many ways more valuable than all existing archives i've discovered so
> far.
> 
> i have not discovered a microformat, or indeed any existing schema
> (help me on this one, i'm sure i'm missing something), that addresses
> this opportunity.
> 
> my sense is that it could be as follows:
> 
> * hminutes root format
> -hcalendar for meeting location, time, description, etc.
> -hcard for organization -- maybe new class for "department"?
> *new microformat?: hparticipants (multiple hcards plus class="role")
> -- could be useful in many other circumstances
> -then multiple "content" items
> -could include "hchat" or whatever for transcripts
> -or "discussion" for general summaries of discussion items
> but specifically:
> *hdecision: include decision-type (ie. robert's rules, consensus,
>   supermajority, etc.), potentially what the votes were (hparticipants
>   with particular roles?), tagged subject matter, and result (approved,
>   denied, proposed, tabled, sent to committee).
> *htask: hparticipants for who, tagged subject, dtdeadline (or
>   reportback ;) -- maybe percent complete?, parent task somehow?
>   (obviously, this should also work for project mgmt in general)
> 
> [hdecision and htask could be standalone root formats -- some decisions
> come without meetings, and also, alas, do tasks.]
>   
> what do folk think?  is there something like this out there already?  i
> know it's a bit of a big hunk to chew for microformats, but the potential
> is enormous: imagine if all your various meetings were reported in
> hminutes rss streams, that were automatically funneled into your to-do
> lists and important decisions flagged for attention and review?
> reminders and all.  ;)
> 
> i would like to implement something on this standard for our organizing
> efforts here, fairly soon.  would much prefer to be with feedback and in
> direction of open standards.  should i wiki?
> 
> thanks, and blessings.
> .b
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