Step four: Minute by minute

What the minutes do

Minutes are legal documents recording decisions. But there certainty ends! How they are designed depends very much on an organisation's history and traditions. Many organisations record pages and pages of discussion and interaction - just because that's the way they have always done it.

The best view is probably that the purpose of minutes is to record decisions. This includes decisions to 'note' items but it doesn't include interaction between members. But as long as decisions are recorded, what else is included is a matter for the Board itself to decide.

Activity

In this activity we look again at the Jamestown Boards' Minutes. The minutes are listed, below them are four things they might do. By moving your mouse over each of the four items: Record, Note, Reproduce, Report an explanation will pop up. You then drag each of these descriptions into the box next to the item. You will note that in some cases there is more than one box. This is because some items were fulfilling more than one function.

Let's just stop and listen to some reflections on the meeting from three of the Boards members.