Idea: Interface for meeting note-taking

FWIW, I've been having a lovely time using Loomio as a meeting-support tool, roughly like this:

• A few days before the meeting, I put up a draft agenda, and invite group members to add things that are important to them.
• Sometimes when I've sensed contention about what should be worked on in a meeting, I put up a proposal along the lines of I've shared an outcome I want to get from this meeting. The position statements from those proposals have generated a lot of clarity about what's actually most important to prioritise.
• Immediately before the meeting starts, I write the agenda points on a whiteboard — or better yet just project the Loomio thread's context panel itself.
• At the beginning of the meeting, after welcome and check-ins, I ask someone to record notes & actions. This often happens in a linked Google Document, but I like it even better when it's simply a comment in the thread, @-mentioning people who've taken responsibility for various tasks.
• After the meeting people can use the thread to report in on how their tasks are going — or to be chased up 😀

To further illustrate our use case: at our company we have a weekly meeting for all members where current issues are discussed, it basically acts as the weekly standup for the whole company, though we do sit down as it tends to drag on ;-)

The meetings are always done in person while beaming a Google Document to the wall, with some rare remote participants using video-chat.

Your workflow sounds great for networked meetings, but I don't think it would work in our case for two reasons:

• asynchronous communication in the form of comments is awkward (especially because one person is doing most of the note-taking)
• we always discuss several un-related topics, so proposals and follow-ups should be channelled into their own discussions

Of course I'm biased from our current workflow, but the process has been working well for years and I think adding some features in this direction (e.g. recurring discussions with templating) could be very worthwhile. Hopefully Loomio will get some traction in our company and we'll be able to contribute some of this functionality :)

Great idea.

Nice one Markus. Perhaps we should investigate an integration between minutes.io and Loomio...

FWIW here's the process I use when I'm hosting a meeting in my cohousing group (because we are funny we call the host the "ghost"):

• Started a Loomio proposal to get people to confirm their attendance + share one agenda point or outcome they wanted from the meeting
• Made sure we locked in a firm meeting time and location
• Set up a google doc in the Meeting Notes folder for the notes, including actions from last meeting + agenda for this one, and links to handy resources
• Made an audio recording and put it in the folder too
• Rang a bell to invoke my ghost powers, e.g. starting the meeting on time, or moving a conversation along if it felt like we were just yarning for fun
• Put a time-box around every agenda point
• Listened for the smallest next action we could take, then reflected that back at the group to check no one had any concerns
• Listened for topics we could move onto Loomio to discuss in detail
• Listened for additional discussion topics that were brought up in the check in circle
• Made sure all actions are assigned to people
• Put the actions back in the original Loomio thread and @mentioned everyone
• Shared my process in our Loomio group so we can learn together about what works and what we want to do differently next time

@richarddbartlett your process sounds nice as well, I especially like the bell-ringing :)

I'm thinking integrating something like EtherPad Lite or ProseMirror as an alternative interface for the discussion description and/or comments would already provide most of this feature, and remove the need for syncing content between two platforms. This could then be extended later with workflow features like converting a text snippet into its own discussion (which would replace the text with a link to the discussion)

Sounds great - I was going to suggest an integration of etherpad as a starting place too - or of one of the webrtc video conferencing tools such as Jitsi Meet: https://meet.jit.si/ (which contains etherpad integration itself too).

Great thread, thanks all! Load of useful nuggets of wisdom/ links here :)