Sober Counsel

Minutes of meetings have been around for a long time. Before email, they were circulated on paper to the attendees of the meeting. Nowdays they are circulated in a similar way, but the technology has changed - they are sent by email.

This has dealt with the following issues:

• Paper consumption has been reduced
• They can be easily forwarded to additional people

It has left the following problems though:

• minutes clog up email inboxes
• They remain difficult to find after a while
• they can only be seen and searched by the recipients of the minutes

Enter Web 2.0

If we use an intranet/extranet based blogging solution as a method of publishing minutes, then we can solve several more problems:

• Any person with access can search the minutes for mention of specific topics
• Tags categories can be applied and searched.
• Email box clutter reduced
• there is always a place I can go to refer to old minutes
• If I use an RSS-Reader I can carry historical, searchable minutes with me.
• It is easy to comment on minutes and distribute changes.
• Many blog solutions provide a subscribe-by-email module for those users who cannot adapt.

There are however certain issues:

• Security requirements of certain minutes will mean they have to be handled differently
• Version control of changes to Blog content is not very mature, or even desirable.
• Users will need to learn to use RSS-Readers.

For the most part, this will be a great solution to make it much easier to share and distribute minutes.

Tags:   Blog Technology · Blogging · Governance · Management · Meeting Minutes · RSS · Web 2.0No Comments