The minutes of TC meetings
are a key part of the group’s historical record. They are useful for members
who miss a meeting or as a reminder of decisions made and pending business in
preparation for an upcoming meeting. They memorialize attendance and quorum,
document key decisions and milestones, and, in many cases, are needed when
requesting support actions from OASIS staff.
To help meet OASIS’s
principle of maximizing visibility into TC work, the TAB recommends these best
practices for preparing and recording your minutes.
The OASIS requirements for
meeting minutes are deliberately minimal in order to provide committees with
the maximum amount of flexibility in how they are handled. The OASIS TC Process
and the Committee Operations Process documents only require that:
●
Minutes be posted to the committee’s primary
mailing list; and
●
Minutes record individual attendance at the
meeting.
Regarding the second
requirement, TC Administration has interpreted the requirement to mean that the
names of attendees must be listed in the minutes and the minutes must indicate
whether or not quorum (51% of Voting Members) was achieved. Although it seems
convenient to link to the attendance page of a calendar entry for the
attendees, that record is not authoritative. It can be changed after the fact
or even deleted. You can use that page to copy and paste the names into your
minutes. However, the names must be in the document itself.
While the requirements are
minimal, the TAB recommends the following practices as most likely to result in
concise, accurate minutes that will be as useful in the future as they are
today.
Here are our recommendations
on how to take and publish TC minutes.
Use
the word “Minutes” and the meeting date in the subject line of the email. For
example, “Draft minutes for <tc-name> 2017-07-24.”
This seems
obvious but from time to time people forget to do it. For someone trying to find
a record of your prior meetings, it is very frustrating to search the archive
for the word “minutes” and finding nothing.
Similarly,
if you write the minutes in a word processing file and load it to your document
repository, use “Minutes” and the meeting date in the title of the document.
This will ensure that the word appears in the automatically generated email
sent from the repository.
We
recommend putting your minutes directly into the text of the email message to
the committee’s mailing list. That is the most convenient format for searching
and linking. You are welcome, of course, to keep minutes in a stand-alone
document like OpenOffice, MS Office, or PDF so long as they are stored in the
committee’s document repository and an email including the link to the document
is sent to the mailing list. This should happen automatically when you upload
the file.
Note that
you can keep draft minutes in a mutable format such as a wiki or a Google Doc.
However, you should treat these as scratch pad formats - e.g. for drafting live
minutes during a meeting. The final, approved form must be fixed and immutable.
(A word processing document qualifies once it is loaded into your document
repository.) Note that TC Administration will not act on motions documented in
wikis or other mutable formats.
One
helpful addition to TC minutes is a statement of who gained or lost voting
rights as of the last meeting and other changes in status such as Leaves of
Absence. For example:
|
Name
|
Affiliation
|
Role
|
Present
|
|
Kevin
Mangold (KM)
|
US
National Institute of Standards and Technology
|
Chair, Voting Member
|
Yes
|
|
Ross
Micheals (RM)
|
US
National Institute of Standards and Technology
|
Secretary,
Voting Member
|
Yes
|
|
Anne
Wang (AW)
|
3M HIS
(Cogent)
|
Voting Member
|
|
|
Cathy
Tilton (CT)
|
Daon
|
Member
(may vote after the end of this meeting)
|
Yes
|
|
Sander
Fieten (SF)
|
Individual
|
Voting Member
|
Yes
|
|
Jeff
Dunne (JD)
|
Johns
Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
|
Leave
of Absence
|
|
|
John
Smith (JS)
|
University
of Southern California
|
Voting Member (will lose voting
rights after this meeting)
|
|
Recording
these in your minutes can help alert your members to their change in status so
that they are not surprised at their next meeting.
It
is best to draft TC minutes as soon after the meeting as possible while the
memory of the event is fresh in your mind.
Minutes
are not a transcript of every comment or response made during a meeting.
Minutes should capture enough detail to identify issues and record the
decisions for subsequent readers.
Minutes
should typically contain:
●
the date and time of the meeting;
●
the meeting agenda;
●
the list of attendees and whether quorum was
achieved;
●
action items assigned including agreed editorial
changes to a specification;
●
any announcements made;
●
record of any standing items addressed;
●
all motions made along with who made the motion and
whether it passed or failed;
●
details of votes, whether formal or informal, straw
polls, etc.;
●
any subcommittee reports including who gave them.
If you
keep a chat log during your meeting, it is perfectly acceptable to append the
chat log to the minutes.
The
meeting agenda should include major decisions to be taken during the meeting.
Circulating
drafts of expected motions to the members ahead of the meeting can save
valuable working time while you are together. You can discuss and fine-tune the
wording of the motion and gauge whether it has enough support to pass ahead of
time, not during the actual meeting time. This also enables your minutes to be
pre-populated with the motions beforehand.
MInutes
should be considered ‘draft’ until approved in a meeting of the TC. Note that
TC Administration will generally accept draft minutes in requests for support.
Typically, the draft minutes should be reviewed by the Chair first, followed by
circulation to the full TC membership.
It is good
practice to indicate if changes are made to draft minutes when they are
approved. For example, the minutes might state: “Minutes are approved with the
following modifications…”
Please let us know if you
have any questions or suggestions on this document. Send comments to tab-askthetab@lists.oasis-open.org.
Here is a simple template
that you can use for your meeting minutes.
Title: Minutes of the
<tc-name> meeting on <date>
Agenda:
<list of agenda items
with any pre-planned motions listed>
Attendees:
<list of TC members
attending>
The meeting <had / did
not have> quorum (XX of YY Voting Members).
Action items:
-
<name of assignee> - <action item assigned
and status>
Announcements:
<list of any general
announcements made>
Standing business:
<list and disposition of
any business items addressed at every meeting>
< Individual agenda items
>
<for each item on the
agenda, list of topics raised, motions made and outcome, straw polls taken,
etc.>
<subcommittee reports>
<for each subcommittee,
summary of what was reported and by whom>
Any other business
Next meeting date and time:
