Creating Meeting Notes

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Our meeting notes are an important way for us to communicate within the team, the Make WordPress community, and ultimately the whole world. Notes are a summary of the main points in the meeting, and not a complete transcript. They highlight forthcoming dates, act as a reminder on items we are working on, and flag up deadline items and task group sprints. They also feed into our regular updates to other teams.

In the weekly meeting, they will ask if anyone wants to join the rota for drafting notes and working on follow-up.

The note-taking process

  1. Volunteer as note-taker during one of the weekly meetings
  2. Review the latest meeting agenda
  3. Attend the meeting in #marketing SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.
  4. Collect the notes from Slack
  5. Using the template below, draft a new post on make.wordpress.org/marketing (you may need to request author access from a team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts.), preferably by end-of-day Friday following the meeting
  6. Preview the post to check links and references
  7. Notify the team reps for review

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Template

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Notes: Global Marketing Meeting, [Date in M, D, Y format]

If you are reading these notes on a website other than the Make WordPress Marketing blog, you can add comments directly to the #marketing channel on the Make WordPress Slack or via the team’s blog.

After each item in the meeting notes, there is a link directly to the Slack thread. This will help you join in the discussions and to get more involved. The team may not be aware of comments you add on other sites which replicate the notes.

Link to the start of the meeting [link] on Marketing Slack to help with async contributions.

1. Welcome & Introductions

These summary notes focus on key items and actions from the meeting and assist with an asynchronous contribution to the Global Marketing Team. For those unable to attend a meeting for whatever reason please join the discussion threads after the meeting and send your updates there. 

  • The meeting discussions on the Marketing team on Slack can be found at this Slack thread [insert link to thread]
  • Meeting Agenda [insert link to thread]
  • Meeting facilitated by: Name(s) of facilitator(s) [insert link(s) to wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ profile]
  • Meeting notes: Name of notetaker [insert link to wordpress.org profile]
  • Editor/ Review: Name(s) of reviewer(s) [insert link(s) to wordpress.org profile]

2. Getting to Know Each Other

  1. Meeting attendees: participants can be viewed in this Slack Thread [insert link to thread]
  2. Social question of the week: [Include social question]. View participant response via this Slack thread [insert link to thread].

3. Notes & Volunteer Opportunities

[Link to Slack thread]

Thank you to [insert name of previous note taker and link to wordpress.org profile] for drafting last week’s notes. [insert week to previous week’s notes]

Notetakers for coming weeks – you can join our group of contributors taking part in producing notes by volunteering when you see a call for note-takers during our meetings or adding your name to the weekly GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ card.

  • List three upcoming meeting dates & the corresponding volunteers name & wordpress.org ID
  • List three upcoming meeting dates & the corresponding volunteers name & wordpress.org ID
  • [If not volunteer, list date & ask for volunteers]

4. Project Updates

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The main Marketing Team task board on GitHub.

If you would like specific assistance on using GitHub, please reply in this thread. There is help available! You can also contribute to wiki information we are working on with other teams.

4a. Title of Update [Insert link to Slack thread]

  • Include updates as bulleted list

4b. Title of Update [Insert link to Slack thread]

  • Include updates as bulleted list

5. Diary/Calendar Dates

Our next Coffee break will be [insert date & time in UTC], facilitated by [insert name of facilitator and link to wordpress.org ID]. This bi-weekly social coffee break is held by the Make Marketing team for all WordPress Marketing contributors, and occasional guests. Stop by and meet some of the friendly faces marketing WordPress.Follow this Google Calendar with meetings, collaborations, and social activities. We also list important dates in this Forthcoming Diary Dates post.

6. Open Floor

Next Marketing Meeting: [date] 15:00 UTC #marketing-team #meeting-notes

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FAQ

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Do I have to be an English-native speaker?

We completely recognize that writing notes in English, if it is not your first language, may seem a little daunting. We organize the meeting content so that it is easy to copy items directly from Slack. Marketing Team reps also review the notes prior to publication.

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When can I write the notes?

Some contributors start writing them in the meeting itself. Others start the draft notes straight after the meeting. They use the agenda for the number structure and key links, which makes it a lot easier and quicker to put the notes together. We ask for draft notes to be submitted by Friday 17:00 UTC, so that contributions made asynchronously can be incorporated to be more inclusive of different timezones.

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What do I need to know?

  • Be sure to include the Slack link at the top of the notes. You can find this by going to the initial post of the meeting, and right click it to get the link. As we include the Slack link, notes do not need to be exhaustive, but can focus on the main points and actions. We try to include actions in bullet points with, where possible, the type of skills needed for those tasks
  • Include the WordPress.org usernames of those who attended the meeting in the Google doc. When we moved to greater asynchronous contribution due to the pandemic, we do not include all attendees now in the blog version of the notes, but link directly to the thread where attendees and contributors have included their name.
  • Most conversations will reference a GitHub repository or card, or a document/ spreadsheet, please provide the link to that card in the notes as part of the summary of that discussion.

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