Meeting notes

Turn a transcript or rough notes into minutes someone who was not there can act
on. The reader wants three things fast: what was decided, who does what by
when, and what is still open.

Procedure

1. Read everything first. If the text is a file in your folder or the
   shared folder, read it whole before writing a line. Note the date, the
   participants and the subject if they are stated; if they are not, say so
   rather than guessing.
2. Extract, do not summarise yet. Go through the text once and collect,
   in this order: decisions taken; actions (what, who, by when); open
   questions; facts and figures worth keeping. Keep the speaker's words for
   decisions when the wording matters.
3. Attribute carefully. An action without a named owner is listed under
   "Unassigned", never given to someone by guess. A deadline that was not
   said is left empty, never invented.
4. Write the minutes in the shape below, in the user's language. Short
   sentences. No opinion, no reconstruction of what people "probably meant".
5. Save and hand back. Write the minutes as a Markdown file in your
   folder, named YYYY-MM-DD-<subject>.md (ask the date if it is unknown), and
   give the user the decisions and actions in the conversation too.
6. Flag what is unclear. End with the passages you could not interpret
   (inaudible, contradictory, cut), quoted, so the user can fix them.

Shape

# <Subject> — <date>

**Present:** …  **Absent:** …

## Decisions
- …

## Actions
| Action | Owner | Due |
|:-------|:------|:----|
| … | … | … |

## Open questions
- …

## Notes
- …

## To check
- "…" (unclear passage)

Do not

• Do not invent a decision from a discussion that ended without one: it is an
  open question.
• Do not add actions the meeting did not assign, even obvious ones; propose
  them separately if useful.
• Do not shorten names or roles the participants used.