Meeting Minutes template help

Using the Meeting Minutes Template

To use the Meeting Minutes template:

Using the template to create an agenda for a meeting

• Open a new wiki page using a proper date for establishing NEW minutes, according to the naming standards noted by the Work Group’s Decision Making Practices (DMP). The recommendation from the DMP template (at http://www.hl7.org/permalink/?DMP) is the naming convention:
  

<CCYY-MM-DD>_<Work Group Acronym>_Call_Minutes, or
<CCYY-MM-DD>_<Work Group Acronym>_WGM_Minutes

• Click on the RED link to the (previously) undefined page in order to edit it.
• Type {{subst::Meeting_Minutes_template}} as the only content for the new page. Be sure to use two curly braces and two colons.
• Preview to verify the reference was typed correctly
• "Save" the page. After saving, the contents of the template (with the exception of these instructions) will replace the substitution link.
• Once the meeting minutes template is saved for your work group’s meeting, replace text in <brackets> with your meeting detail, like work group name, date and time of the meeting, and fill in the anticipated meeting attendees.
  • For a recurring Work Group conference call, you may fill in the attendees only once, and save a copy to create another template to re-use the attendee information.
  • You may also wish to make note of the quorum requirements for your Work Group.
  • Remove instructional text (items surrounded by html tags beginning with “<font” and ending with “</font>”. Enter information in the appropriate sections following comment lines beginning with <!-- ********.
  • If your Work Group wishes to use categories to organize wiki minutes, add [[Category:CCYY <Work Group> Minutes|Agenda Template]] . If you maintain another page with links to the Work Group minutes, you may wish to add a link to that page at the top of the minutes, e.g. 'Back to' [[<Work Group> Meeting Minutes]].
  • Add current Agenda items under Agenda (including the link to the prior minutes for Approval)
  • If your Work Group has a separate wiki page with call coordinates or other logistics references you can 'include' it in the template page using {{:<pagename>}}
  • You may also include other wiki pages into your template using {{:<pagename>}} which brings in the content of other wiki pages, for other references like action items lists maintained separately.
• Save again

Using the template to add minutes to an agenda page for a meeting

Later, when editing the page from Agenda to minutes:

• Delete the string "|Agenda Template" from [[Category:2010 <Work Group> Minutes|Agenda Template]] if your Work Group uses categories to organize minutes.
• Delete the Logistics template reference {{:<Work Group> Meetings}}

Using a Wiki page for meeting minutes

To give some permanence to Work Group meeting minutes after they have been approved, you may choose to 'protect' the wiki page, or to upload the minutes to the HL7.org web page as the Work Group's formal repository using http://www.hl7.org/permalink/?UploadMinutes.

Keeping minutes on the Wiki

After the minutes have been approved, the page may be ‘protected’ to prevent any unintentional revisions to the approved minutes. Simply click on the ‘protect’ tab at the top of the Wiki page. There will be a selection box for choosing the protection level for editing – select ‘Administrators only’ (since all users able to edit a wiki page must be registered users). Separate protection options for 'moving' the wiki page and for cascading protection are not necessary. Select the appropriate reason for protecting the wiki page, from the 'Reason' dropdown list, namely "Contents approved and locked". An audit log of protection and unprotection actions will be created.

Requests to unprotect a page should be referred to the cochairs of the Work Group that created or own the Wiki page, and have the cochairs escalate those requests to the wiki administrators. Cochairs will determine if a page is appropriate to unlock. If time permits, they may choose to request of the person who locked the page to unprotect it. If unlocking needs to be done more quickly, the cochairs may make a request to Wikiadmin@hl7.org to request a sysop to unprotect. Even if the creator of a page is no longer a co-chair of the WG/owner of a wiki page, the co-chairs of the WG/owner of the Wiki page have the authority to determine a request to unprotect a page.

Using a Wiki page to capture minutes, keeping minutes on the Work Group Web page

In order to upload the contents of wiki pages to the Work Group’s web page, it must be exported. The wiki software creates a printable version from the toolbox menu on the left navigation bar. Once the page has been rendered as a printable version, several options are available for export. Your browser should allow saving as .txt which will lose most of the formatting. PDF is the best choice as it is readable on multiple types of operating systems and readers are available on many browsers. Free software is available for exporting web pages to PDF; you may choose the one that is best suited for your computer, operating system, and environment. Recommendations include PDFCreator, PrimoPDF, Win2PDF, or PDFArea. If you have a licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat you can also generate PDFs from Adobe.

Upon completing the export of the wiki page, a co-chair of the Work Group may upload the file to be posted to the Work Group’s web page, in the Meeting Minutes section. This can be done from the Meeting Minutes section of each Work Group’s web page e.g. http://www.hl7.org/Special/committees/es/index.cfm, or from the cochairs utility at http://www.hl7.org/permalink/?UploadMinutes. You must be a Work Group co-chair to have the privileges to upload documents for the Work Group’s web site.

---

© 2010 Health Level Seven® International. All rights reserved.