@JAufrecht, thanks for the prompt! @Bawolff: thanks for being a guinea pig yesterday for this tactic! Also, thanks for the thoughtful email on the subject. @Qgil (and others) any further thoughts?

@ksmith and I have been discussing this on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Meeting_best_practices_(including_remote_staff). In short, we're discussing how a merge with the "best practices" page (with the suboptimal URL) and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Good_meetings might work.

I think I've figured out how to refine my advice on this front, based on my experience in the past couple of weeks.

Detailed notes (owned by the "scribe")

The "scribe" often performs the role of a court stenographer. When we have someone who isn't a typical participant as "scribe", they often just want to capture "everything", and then sort it out after the fact. For important meetings, this is incredibly valuable and we often appreciate this. Stenography isn't required for every meeting, but we shouldn't preclude or discourage it either. The scribe should own the "detailed minutes" section, and everyone else should feel comfortable helping the scribe ensure the accuracy of this section.

Summary notes (owned by the "facilitator")

• possibly in conjunction with the "reporter"

Having a competent scribe then helps the facilitator. The facilitator can own the "summary notes" section, which should strive to be an NPOV account of the meeting. Since the answer to "who called this meeting?" is often expected to be the facilitator, the meeting will work best if they ensure we do the work outside of the meeting time.

• Before the meeting: the facilitator can/should prepopulate the "summary notes" section with the anticipated structure of the meeting, using that as the working agenda for the meeting. They should put hyperlinks to important information that will likely be discussed in the summary notes.
• During the meeting: the facilitator can help structure the conversation by capturing "what question are we trying to answer?" Save the synthesis of the answer for after the meeting; just synthesize the question. My experience is that this style of note-taking helps me pay attention to the conversation, without distracting me from understanding the speaker's answer. It's also much easier to ensure that the real-time notes are NPOV, since a question is much easier to make NPOV than an answer
• After the meeting - in order to generate notes that are useful for people that weren't able to attend, it is helpful if the facilitator (or the "reporter" if that role was assigned/taken) generates a summary of the discussion, using the questions generated in real-time during the discussion as an outline for what was discussed. The summary should try to be NPOV, striving to report which questions seemed to have consensus, and which ones were still divisive.

Agenda (owned by the "timekeeper")

With the "summary notes" section prepopulated with the hyperlinks and background information, the agenda can be much shorter, and just focus on the time slots of the meeting. This gives the timekeeper a very simple job of making sure that the discussion is on track to complete in the amount of time allotted for each topic.

@ksmith @RobLa-WMF no one is currently assigned to this task and it appears to be orphaned. Can this task be closed and/or made more actionable and given an owner?

@RobLa-WMF : I would suggest that you create a new page, focused purely on this idea of split-format notes. You could link to it from wherever, which might change over time. I don't think documenting and sharing this novel idea should be blocked on refactoring other pages.

I'm not feeling motivated to pick up any of this right now, myself. Maybe someday.