Suggestions for Action Tracking in Meeting Minutes?

[Ken Brucker]

I'm working on migrating my note taking in meetings and 1:1s into a TiddlyWiki and the key sticking point I have is in managing action items that come out of the meetings. What I've seen of action trackers, they all seem to require that actions be setup as unique tiddlers and the state is managed via tags. That method complicates the note taking process in a non-intuitive way and can lose the context (point in the meeting minutes) where the action is captured.

What I've been wanting is the ability to have actions captured inline in the minutes, along with ability to search across meetings for any open actions for display in a Summary Tiddler. I'm not looking for one of the full-on GTD type systems.

Requirements:

- Inline capture and display of action items (AI).
- Ability to list AIs from tiddlers, with some limited filtering on state (open, closed, all) and tiddler tags
- AI list to include a link back to source of AI
- Wherever an AI is displayed, provide checkbox (or functionally similar element) to mark AI open/closed.

Possible macros:

<<ai aiState aiText>> - Captures an AI in a tiddler. aiState would be altered by the displayed checkbox
<<ai_list aiState tag_list>> - Display list of AIs based on filter parameters. tag_list optional

Anything like this exist?

Thoughts on such a plugin positive or negative?

Pointers on how to implement? Are there proper ways to modify tiddler content?

Regards,
Ken

[HansBKK]

On Friday, July 15, 2011 8:50:29 PM UTC+7, Ken Brucker wrote:

    I'm working on migrating my note taking in meetings and 1:1s into a TiddlyWiki and the key sticking point I have is in managing action items that come out of the meetings.  What I've seen of action trackers, they all seem to require that actions be setup as unique tiddlers and the state is managed via tags.  That method complicates the note taking process in a non-intuitive way and can lose the context (point in the meeting minutes) where the action is captured.

    What I've been wanting is the ability to have actions captured inline in the minutes, along with ability to search across meetings for any open actions for display in a Summary Tiddler.  I'm not looking for one of the full-on GTD type systems.

<snip>

Ken,

I'm afraid I can't help with your interesting idea, but thought I'd put in my two cents in the hope that it might be helpful.

I personally think that it would be much more do-able to keep to the idea of a tiddler being an "atomic" unit of information for anything you want to list/display etc separately from its context.

My approach would be to change the idea of "the minutes" of a meeting to be a collection of tiddlers rather than a single tiddler. TW's flexibility means you can divide things up however you like, obviously in the context of your request you've got "Action Items" vs say "Reference notes", but you might also have relationships to projects, higher-level goals, people, business departments, etc. The creation date is a natural sort, or you could use a title prefix to ensure a sensible default "all-in-one" view of the minutes of a given meeting at a whole.

I would use a single unique tag per event/meeting, plus then other ones for the above selection/grouping dimensions.

A combination of these two tools from Eric will allow you to get a one-click display of a given meeting, either as a collection of separate tiddlers, or the latter one will present them all collected together in one tiddler.

http://www.tiddlytools.com/#OpenTaggedTiddlers

http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki/msg/dc0857d0d61d4811

However the component "behind the scenes" tiddlers are still available as separate units to be separately tracked, listed/displayed as you like, taking full advantage of TW's native handling plus even more importantly compatibility with the full range of available plugins.

I realize this isn't what you were asking for, so feel free to ignore, just an alternative approach to consider. . .

[Claudio]

Hi Ken,

I've been using TW for keeping minutes and AIs but my solution is
simpler, which makes use of Eric's Comment plugin, Checkbox plugin and
QuickEdit plugin.

Meeting notes are first entered into ordinary tiddlers, which are
named in the projectcode_date_description (e.g. ProjXX 20110718
Meeting with John). When there are AIs associated with a particular
meeting, I will insert the Comment code <<comment AllTasks>> into the
tiddler using the Insert button created by QuitEdit. When you save the
tiddler, you will see a text field appears for entering the AIs. If
you want to track open/closed status, you can include [_] in front of
the AI description, which will create a checkbox. All AIs will be
registered centrally in the [[AllTasks]] tiddler., where a link to the
meeting notes tiddler will be included automatically.

The drawback of this is that you cannot sort the AIs in [[AllTasks]]
easily. I do not need much sorting, What I'm doing is using table in
[[AllTasks]] (you can defined it with Comment plugin). Then, the table
data can be coverted (using QuickEdit) and sort in Excel.

Hope the above help!

[Julian Knight]

I agree that this is not a comfortable use case just now.

I tend to put actions in a simple list with a checkbox (CheckboxPlugin). Anything that needs more active management I would create in a new tiddler later on (not in the meeting) and put a link in the original list.

I do have something else for Risks and Issues though. In this case I use a forEachTiddler inclusion that lists the risks for a project in my weekly report tiddler. The end of the forEachTiddler includes a computed link - when you click on the link, you get a new tiddler with the appropriate template and the next risk/issue ID in the title.


Here is the transclusion in case it helps:
/%
!info
|Name|*Risks|
|Source||
|Version|0.0.1|
|Author|Julian Knight|
|License| |
|~CoreVersion|2.6|
|Type|transclusion|
|Description|Display a listing of risks and issues in a table|
Usage
<<<
{{{
<<tiddler *Risks with: ["I-JK-MIG-001","I-JK-MIG-002"]>>
}}}
<<<
Example
<<<
{{{<<tiddler [[*Risks]] with: ["I-JK-MIG-001","I-JK-MIG-002","XXXX"]>>}}}
<<tiddler [[*Risks##show]] with: ["I-JK-MIG-001","I-JK-MIG-002","XXXX"]>>
<<<
!end

!show
<<forEachTiddler
  where
  ' tiddler.title.readBracketedList().containsAny( list ) '
  script '
    var list=$1;

    function strt(){window.remain = list.slice();return "";}

    function myTitle(t) {
      //if(!window.remain) window.remain = list.slice(); // copy
      window.remain.splice(window.remain.indexOf(t),1); // remove current entry
      return t;
    }

    function getMy(n,d,tiddler) {
      var out = store.getValue(tiddler,n);
      if((typeof out) == "undefined") {
        return d;
      } else {
        return out;
      }
    }
  '
  write
  ' "|[[" + myTitle(tiddler.title) + "]]|" +
     getMy("shorttitle","",tiddler) +
    "|<<tiddler [["+tiddler.title+"##Description]]$))"  +
    "|<<tiddler [["+tiddler.title+"##Tasks]]$))" +
    "|<<RAG "+getMy("rag","G",tiddler)+"$))" + "|\n" '
  begin ' strt() + "|ID |Title| Description |Outstanding Tasks |RAG |h\n" '
  end ' "New: [["+window.remain.join("]],[[")+"]]" '
>>
!end

%/<<tiddler {{ var src='*Risks'; src+(tiddler&&tiddler.title==src?'##info':'##show'); }}
    with: [[$1]]>>

The risk template has a number of standard headings (Description, Tasks, etc.) that are translated into the required columns. I also have a small plugin that I wrote that takes a RAG (Red, Amber, Green) status and wraps it with a <span> of the appropriate background colour. All risk tiddlers are tagged with *Risks (note the leading *). It's not very pretty I know and could do with some serious reworking but I needed it in a hurry and it worked well enough for the project I was on.

Regards, Julian Knight

[Ken Brucker]

A couple votes for the checkbox plugin. I'll have to check it out and see how it fits in with my desired workflow.

Really appreciate the suggestions.

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