Auckland meeting guidelines

Guidelines for how meetings are coordinated, and minutes handled.

These are merely guidelines.  Improvements and simplifications are encouraged and welcomed.


A draft agenda is posted on the cellml.org site.

About 2 days prior to meeting, team@cellml.org is e-mailed the draft agenda, and asked for any additional agenda items, replies should be to team@cellml.org so that those who have read the draft agenda are aware of any modifications.

On the day of the meeting (usually Wednesdays), about 10 copies of the agenda are printed by the meeting chair, these are handed out at the meeting.  The previous meetings minutes are also printed, and available at the meeting.

One person is selected to minute the meeting.

The meeting starts with a review of the action items from the previous week.  Usually action items have been actioned during the week, but any that have not been completed are simply carried over (i.e. added as action items for the current meeting).

The chair of the meeting aims to allow an appropriate amount of time for each agenda item so that the meeting will not run over time. 

Break-away meetings: if a topic tends to only involve a minority of the attendees, an option is to move it to a break-away meeting, so that the main meeting can continue.  Break-away meetings are usually held straight after the main meeting.  Attendees are asked to keep this slot free.  Break-away meetings help keep the majority of the attendees involved, and this also helps avoid running over time.

After the main meeting, the minutes are typed up and mailed to the attendees for review.  Note that the attendees are addressed directly, rather than via a mailing list.

About 2 days should be allowed for review comments to be incorporated into the minutes.  Requests for revisions should be cc'd to all meeting attendees, since some attendees may have read earlier drafts.  Revisions are made by the person who originally wrote the minutes.  (Note: this is slightly cumbersome, and is done to workaround certain shortfalls of the current content management system.  Ideally, anyone should be able to make revisions, RSS feeds could be used for allowing other attendees to see updates, and the content system should keep full revision histories and allow roll-backs.  When a better content sytem is in place, this part of the procedure should ideally be revised.)

Once sufficient time has passed for reviews, an e-mail is sent by the minutes author to cellml-discussion@cellml.org announcing the minutes.


Further notes about minutes:

List names of attendees.

Apologies: List names of people who usually attend, but were unable to attend current meeting.

Headings: follow items on original agenda

Action items: these need to be numbered and in bold.