All in One View
Content from Introduction
Last updated on 2026-02-24 | Edit this page
Estimated time: 16 minutes
Overview
Questions
- What is covered in this course?
- Who are the instructors?
- Who is participating?
Objectives
After completing this episode, participants will be able to…
- Explain how instructors and participants will interact throughout the course.
- Summarise the main skills that will be taught in this course.
Note: some of the content in this course is reproduced or adapted from The Carpentries Instructor Training curriculum.
Using correct names and pronouns (e.g. “she/her”) is important to setting a tone of respect. Learning these is hard to do quickly, so we recommend displaying them prominently during the course.
In an online course, give everyone a moment to update their display name to reflect how they would like to be addressed.
Note that pronouns are personal and some participants might prefer not to share them. Do not force people to share their pronouns.
Before The Course Begins
Getting to Know Each Other
If the instructor has chosen an icebreaker question, participate by writing your answers in the shared document for the course.
Code of Conduct
To make clear what is expected, everyone participating in The Carpentries activities is required to abide by our Code of Conduct. Any form of behaviour to exclude, intimidate, or cause discomfort is a violation of the Code of Conduct. In order to foster a positive and professional learning environment we encourage you to:
- Use welcoming and inclusive language
- Be respectful of different viewpoints and experiences
- Gracefully accept constructive criticism
- Focus on what is best for the community
- Show courtesy and respect towards other community members
If you believe someone is violating the Code of Conduct, we ask that you report it to The Carpentries Code of Conduct Committee by completing this form.
To begin class, each instructor should give a brief introduction of themselves.
(For some guidelines on introducing yourself, see the Workshop Introductions section of the Instructor Training curriculum).
Running Effective Online Meetings Overview
We’ve all had experiences with terrible meetings. They start late, last too long, and never seem to meet their objectives. Sometimes they don’t even seem to have objectives! This course will teach you the skills you need to run good meetings - meetings that make good use of peoples’ time, make progress towards your group’s goals, and ensure all participants’ ideas and perspectives are brought to the table.
Before we begin, we’ll take a few minutes to share some of our bad meeting experiences and unpack what made them so bad!
Our First Exercise (10 minutes)
Think of an example of a bad meeting you attended.
- What did you find was making you not want to attend more meetings like it?
- Why did it make such an impression on you?
Try to differentiate between what was bad about the behavior of the meeting leader and participants and what was bad about the setup of the meeting.
Take a few minutes to write down some notes about your answer, then introduce yourself to the other participants and tell them about it.
During the course, we will introduce the steps you can take to design a meeting environment that brings together all meeting participants in an inclusive and welcoming way to make progress towards your group’s goals. By the end of the course, you can expect to have developed and practiced strategies for crafting meaningful agendas, focusing group discussion towards outcomes, ensuring everyone’s perspective is shared, and dealing with common disruptive behaviours. Let’s get started!
- This course aims to teach you how to organise good meetings that people agree are worthwhile.
Content from Creating an agenda
Last updated on 2026-02-24 | Edit this page
Estimated time: 30 minutes
Overview
Questions
- How do I establish and communicate goals for my meeting?
Objectives
After completing this episode, participants will be able to…
- Collect proposed agenda items from meeting participants
- Triage to create a maximally-impactful agenda
- Establish a transparent process for saving items for future meetings
If you’re going to have a meeting, you should have something to meet about. Meetings shouldn’t happen just because there’s time reserved on the calendar. Whether for recurring meetings or one time meetings, the meeting host should take some time in advance to decide what topics will be discussed, for how long, and what the intended outcomes are.
Collecting agenda items
If you’re hosting a meeting, you will likely already have some ideas for the agenda, but you should also have a process for participants to propose agenda items. This is especially true if your meeting is a recurring meeting with the same group members (e.g. a weekly project team meeting). Enabling participants to propose agenda items for the group’s discussion and co-working increases the overall impact and buy-in for the meeting. Participants will be able to use meeting time to get feedback on products they’ve been developing, help to overcome obstacles they’ve encountered, and insights into questions that benefit from multiple perspectives. Instead of spending meeting time wishing the meeting was over so they could get their “real work” done, participants will be motivated to engage fully in the meeting because it directly progresses their and other project member’s goals.
The Carpentries uses a Google form to collect agenda item suggestions for our weekly full-team meeting, but your team can use any method. For informal, recurring meetings, a simple method could be asking team members to enter proposed items directly into a shared agenda document. Item proposers should indicate their suggested topics and the amount of time they want for each, along with any preparation (e.g. pre-reading) people should do before the meeting. They should also indicate whether their agenda item is time sensitive, or can be saved for a future meeting. Make sure you establish a deadline for submitting proposed agenda items!
Setting up the agenda
After the deadline has passed, but at least a day before the meeting, the meeting host should triage submitted topics to create a final agenda, selecting the most important, time-sensitive, and/or impactful items for discussion and co-working. If you have too many items to cover in one meeting, be sure to set target dates for any items that are being reserved for future meetings and communicate those dates with the individuals who proposed those items. It can be very demotivating to propose items for discussion only to have them disappear into the ether! It may be useful to maintain a “garage” for future meeting topics, along with their associated dates, for transparency and accountability. The meeting host will keep the “garage” list up to date by adding new items as they are submitted and removing items once they have been discussed. This can be done directly on the agenda document, or on a separate document or spreadsheet, so long as it is accessible to participants.
If items are submitted that don’t require discussion or feedback (for example, announcements), these can be highlighted at the top of the agenda in a dedicated “non-verbal updates” section. Keep this section short and to-the-point. Participants should be able to read it while they settle in for the meeting.
Time estimates
For each item on the agenda, include a time estimate, both as the number of minutes that will be allocated for that item and the associated start and end times. This will help keep early agenda items from dominating the meeting time, and ensure that all topics get their fair share of the group’s attention. Keeping the meeting to time will be the job of the Timekeeper (a role we’ll discuss later). If an agenda item is taking longer than expected, the item owner can request additional time, awarded based on consent of the remaining agenda item owners.
For online meetings spanning multiple time zones, start and end times should be listed in a time zone agnostic format. For example, a 15 minute agenda item starting at the top of the hour can be listed as :00 - :15). Time stamps should be adjusted by the timekeeper as meeting time is requested and ceded.
MARKDOWN
## Garage
* Update on brand refresh project (15 min) - Kathleen (September meeting)
## 17 August, 2026
### Pre-meeting reading
* Please browse [the data model schematic](https://example.org/data-model-schematic.png) before joining the meeting
### Non-verbal updates
* Reminder: equipment inventory updates due 22 August.
### Agenda
* Shuttle launch retrospective (20 min, :00 - :20) - Rob
* Feedback on community data model (15 min, :20 - :35) - Yochannah
* Planning Q3 seminar schedule (15 min, :35 - :50) - PatriciaThe meeting host should send the meeting agenda to all participants at least 24-hours before the meeting along with any required pre-reading or other preparation.
Agenda Triage Practice (10 min)
You are in charge of organising the agenda for your research group’s weekly 60-minute meeting. You’ve received the following proposed agenda items:
- Clarification of authorship order on upcoming paper (Amina) - 15 min
- Brainstorm priority research themes for the next 3 years (Mateo) - 25 min
- Grant proposal feedback (Soo-Jin) - 20 min. Internal deadline next week. Two page proposal outline included as pre-read.
- Research ethics review delays (Luca) - 15 min.
- New funding call discussion (Priya) - 20 minutes. Expression of interest due in 3 weeks.
- Updated travel reimbursement policy (Kwame) - 5 min
- Lab printer repeatedly malfunctioning (Elena) - 10 min
- Request to coordinate bulk software license purchase (Yara) - 10 min
In your small group, create a 60-minute agenda for this meeting. Include time stamps and item owners. Create a garage for future meetings. If there are any items that aren’t relevant for group discussion, what will you as the meeting coordinator do to communicate appropriate next steps with the individuals who proposed them?
Group answers to this challenge will vary, and that’s ok! One possible solution is shown below.
- Non-verbal updates: Check your email for our updated travel reimbursement policy. Contact Kwame with questions.
- :00 - :20 Grant proposal feedback (Soo-Jin)
- :20 - :35 Research ethics review delays (Luca)
- :35 - :50 New funding call discussion (Priya)
- :50 - :60 Bulk software license coordination (Yara)
Garage:
- Brainstorm priority research themes for the next 3 years (Mateo) - 25 min, next week (Preparatory work to be sent out in advance)
Handle outside of meeting:
- Lab printer repeatedly malfunctioning (Elena) - put in a facilities ticket
- Clarification of authorship order on upcoming paper (Amina) - direct discussion among paper authors
- Meetings will be most effective when participants are involved in setting the agenda.
- Not all submitted items should make it to the final agenda.
Content from Assigning meeting roles
Last updated on 2026-02-27 | Edit this page
Estimated time: 45 minutes
Overview
Questions
- How can I use meeting roles to help my meeting stay on track?
Objectives
After completing this episode, participants will be able to…
- Define three essential meeting roles and their functions.
- Prepare meeting participants to fulfill these roles.
- Assign roles to participants fairly.
Now that you’ve done the important work of deciding what your meeting is about, what you want to discuss and decide, and for how long, it’s time to make sure the meeting itself runs smoothly. In order to do this, you will need individuals to take on a few specific roles - Facilitator, Notetaker, and Timekeeper.
Assigning Roles
It is important to make sure roles are assigned fairly. Ideally, roles should rotate across all meeting participants. This helps to establish meeting norms and gives participants a shared responsibility for upholding them. However, do provide an option for people to opt out of roles, either for an individual meeting (they may be trying to eat lunch or managing care-giving duties), or for all meetings (someone who uses voice-typing may not be able to be Notetaker).
Don’t rely on volunteers, as junior people in the meeting may feel implicit pressure to take the roles that are perceived to have less power (like Notetaker) and be less likely to take on more powerful roles (like Facilitator). We recommend using a randomiser to assign meeting roles - for example random.org/lists.
Include meeting role assignments in the agenda when you send it to participants at least a day before the meeting. For one-time meetings, or meetings where the participant list varies over time, it can be helpful to include a short description of each role at the top of the agenda. For example:
MARKDOWN
## Meeting Roles
- Facilitator - Amina
- Notetaker - Mateo
- Timekeeper - Sofia
- Backup - Kwame
## Role Description
- Facilitator: Introduces agenda items, monitors for raised hands, keeps track of order, and ensures everyone has an opportunity to share their views.
- Notetaker: Records meeting attendance and major points of discussion, with a particular emphasis on decisions and action items.
- Timekeeper: Pays attention to the clock and alerts the group when time for specific agenda items is running low.
- Backup: Fills in for any of these roles if the designated person needs to be away from keyboard.
Although introducing and socialising meeting roles may take a few minutes of precious meeting time, it will be well worth it for the gains in meeting focus, shared ownership, and engagement. Once you start using meeting roles, you’ll wonder how you ever lived through meetings without them! Now let’s explore each role in more detail.
The Facilitator
The Facilitator is responsible for keeping people on the agenda and avoiding tangents. In some contexts, the Facilitator may be referred to as the meeting Chair. However, it is important to note that, like the other meeting roles, the Facilitator role should rotate across participants and should not be restricted to the person who prepared the agenda.
The Facilitator will introduce each agenda item, and pass leadership of that item over to the item owner (usually the person who submitted the agenda request). During discussion of that item, the Facilitator will monitor the meeting chat and visual meeting window to keep track of who is waiting to speak and to raise attention to any questions that have been asked in the chat. Participants can signal that they want a turn to speak by using your video-conferencing platform’s “raise hand” feature, typing “hand” in the chat, or physically raising their hand. The Facilitator can recognise the turn order either verbally or by typing in the chat (“e.g. Amina next, then Lucas, then Mei.”)
The Facilitator should take an active role in prompting individuals who haven’t contributed to share their thoughts. In larger group meetings, this can be achieved through a general prompt (e.g. “I’d like to hear from some of the folks in the room who haven’t shared yet.”). In smaller groups, especially those with recurring attendees, it may be more appropriate to ask individuals by name (e.g. “Hiro, I noticed you’ve been quiet today - did you have thoughts you’d like to add?”).
It will also be the Facilitator’s job to moderate disruptive behaviours that may occur during the meeting, such as an individual dominating the conversation or interrupting other participants. We will learn specific strategies for dealing with disruptive behaviours later in this lesson.
Building Facilitator confidence
Some group members may feel uncomfortable taking on the role of Facilitator, especially newcomers and those in more junior positions. We recommend avoiding assigning the role to anyone who has not had a few previous opportunities to observe it in practice. If anyone feels uncertain about acting as Facilitator, it can be helpful to reassure them that participants typically feel grateful to somebody who takes responsibility for ensuring that the meeting runs smoothly. To build their confidence, make sure to express your appreciation and some words of encouragement as needed, and offer constructive feedback if they ask for it.
The Timekeeper
The Timekeeper’s role is to monitor the clock and alert the Facilitator when time is running short for an item. They will adjust the agenda timestamps as needed based on input from the Facilitator and other participants. For example, there may be empty “buffer” time at the end of the agenda, and/or the owner of a later agenda item may decide to donate time to the current item if the discussion is being productive, or may ask the Facilitator to move their item to the garage for a future meeting.
The Timekeeper’s role is informational, not decisive. Once the Timekeeper has notified the Facilitator about the timing status, it is the Facilitator’s decision whether to reallocate time or move to the next item. This is one reason why the Facilitator’s role is so powerful, and why it should rotate across participants.
The Notetaker
The Notetaker’s job is to make a written record of the major points of discussion. Notes should not be a transcript of the meeting, but rather should focus on ideas considered, decisions made, and action items to be followed up on. Although a Notetaker should be assigned for each meeting, all meeting participants should be empowered to correct, add to, or otherwise amend the notes in real time. Group participation in note-taking is helpful for the Notetaker (for example if they’ve missed a point made), and also helps alleviate any (hopefully unintentional!) bias in whose opinions are placed on the record.
As much as possible, the Notetaker should record not just the idea shared, but also who shared it (using initials or full names if appropriate). This allows for proper crediting of ideas, and also enables follow-up after the meeting if additional clarity or detail is needed.
More guidelines on how to take good notes will be covered later in this lesson.
The Backup
The Backup does not play a specific role during the meeting, but rather is prepared to step into any role as needed, either temporarily or for the remainder of the meeting. For example, if the Notetaker has to leave their desk to deal with an urgent phone call, or if the Facilitator’s internet connection drops. The Backup will also take notes when the Notetaker is speaking. This allows the Notetaker to participate fully in the meeting without worrying about their contributions being missed. Having a backup in place will help protect your meeting against the uncertainties of the digital workplace, and will also have the secondary effect of increasing participant attention!
Diagnosing and Preventing Role Breakdowns (15 minutes)
It can be scary to hand over control of a meeting to the other participants, especially after you’ve put in so much work to coordinating schedules and designing an amazing agenda! How can you help ensure meeting roles are carried out successfully, and what signs can you watch for that might indicate problems?
TDB
Content from Facilitation and disruptive behaviours
Last updated on 2026-09-01 | Edit this page
Estimated time: 60 minutes
Overview
Questions
- How can I handle and reduce disruptions during a meeting?
- How can I ensure that every meeting participant can contribute effectively?
Objectives
At the end of this episode, participants will be able to…
- Identify and mitigate disruptive behaviours.
- Facilitate inclusive discussions that enable everyone to participate.
- Prevent discussions from diverging away from the intended topic or going over time.
Introduction
The meeting host may have done all of the necessary steps to prepare for a good meeting, including putting together a meaningful agenda and preparing participants to serve in the various meeting roles. However, once the meeting starts, and you’ve brought your participants together into your virtual space, a number of behaviours may combine to make the meeting uninspiring, demotivating, and downright painful. These behaviours can be particularly challenging when participants span multiple levels of your organisation’s hierarchy, or have different levels of power due to systemic social marginalisation.
“Behaviours” versus “People”
In discussing issues that may arise during meeting facilitation, we find it helpful to focus on specific behaviours that individuals may exhibit, rather than on the people themselves. We take this approach for two reasons:
- Peoples’ behaviour naturally varies in different situations. Someone who goes off on long tangents in the morning before they’ve had their caffeine, may be more to-the-point after their first hot cuppa.
- As an organization dedicated to the idea of “Always Learning”, we strongly believe that people can change their behaviour over time and learn to be more helpful, productive, and welcoming meeting participants!
Although you may not be able to flatten the organisational hierarchy or correct long-standing imbalances in power distribution in society, there are steps you can take during a meeting to mitigate negative disruptive behaviours. Some of these strategies are most easily implemented when you are serving as the meeting Facilitator, but others can be enacted by any meeting participant. Using these strategies intentionally across your meetings can help shift organisational culture over time and build a more positive meeting environment in which all participants feel comfortable sharing their perspectives.
Common Disruptive Behaviors
The goal of the Facilitator is to complete the agenda within the assigned timeframe, giving each participant a chance to contribute to the decisions being made.
It’s easy for certain behaviours to work against this, by slowing down the meeting or suppressing voices. Therefore, it’s important that the Facilitator can identify these disruptors, and take actions to prevent them negatively affecting the meeting.
Identifying Disruptive Behaviours (5 minutes)
Think of a disruptive meeting behavior that you have observed. Describe what happened, how it impacted the meeting, and what could have been done to avoid or correct the disruption.
This exercise should take about 5 minutes.
The list generated by participants will differ for each session, but some common themes that might emerge include:
- One or a few people talking repeatedly while others don’t talk at all
- Interrupting
- Re-stating someone else’s idea and claiming it as their own
- Someone talking for a long time
- Playing “devil’s advocate”
- Shutting down other people’s ideas, being dismissive or overly negative
- Participants stuck debating unimportant details (“bike shedding”)
- Off-topic discussions happening in the chat
- People not contributing even though their expertise would be valuable!
The United States’ National Ocean and Atmospheric Association provides one possible taxonomy of disruptive behaviours, along with possible interventions for each. In this course, we will focus on some of the most common behaviours, and those most likely to prevent the meeting from being successful, but we encourage you to check out this reference for further learning.
Dominating Conversation
Some people love to speak. They may have strong ideas, or may simply believe their experience or seniority gives them the right to dominate the conversation. This may lead to rambling, and limit opportunities for all participants to contributing their own ideas. In addition to taking up more than their fair share of the meeting time, overly talkative individuals may also negatively impact the group’s motivation.
Anyone can be verbose, but social conditioning and power dynamics mean that individuals from groups carrying higher degrees of privilege are more likely to dominate any particular meeting. This means that individuals from marginalised groups are likely to have fewer opportunities to participate in not just the current meeting, but the sum total of meetings they attend in their careers. As the meeting Facilitator, some things you can do to disrupt this pattern include:
- explicitly noting an imbalance in who has spoken (e.g. “I see that Ethan has another hand, but we haven’t heard from Nadia or Felix yet.”)
- only allowing participants to share one idea per turn (e.g. if Zane starts by saying “I have two points to make” interrupting with “Thanks Zane, could you please pick the most important point for this round and we’ll come back to your second point after Theo and Valentina’s hands?”)
- interrupting someone who has been speaking too long, or is repeating themselves (e.g. “Thanks for sharing Noelle - I want to make sure we have an opportunity to hear from Priya before we wrap up this agenda item.”)
Even if you are not the Facilitator, if you are in a position of relative privilege, there are some things you can do at any meeting you attend to help equalise opportunities:
- If you frequently are the first to speak, consider waiting to put up your hand until at least one or two others have shared their thoughts.
- If the point you were going to make has been made by someone else, put down your hand and note in the chat that you agree with them (e.g. “+1 to Mariam’s point”).
- If the next person on the list has spoken less than you, consider ceding your hand to them.
These strategies can be particularly effective if the individuals you are ceding time to or noting agreement with are members of marginalised groups.
Indecisive or Argumentative
There were goals for bringing together these individuals for this meeting. Whether those goals were to make a specific decision, implement the next stage of a project, or brainstorm funding opportunities to pursue, it can be frustrating to have those goals sidelined by individuals who are overly indecisive or argumentative.
An individual who is overly argumentative may want to play “devil’s advocate” - making arguments in favor of a position they don’t actually agree with. They may also continue to raise issues that have already been resolved, or keep debating after the rest of the group has come to consensus.
Similarly, someone who is overly indecisive may spend an inappropriate amount of time considering every detail of a proposed solution. While these considerations may be necessary to implement the decision, the meeting itself may not be the appropriate venue to hash out those details.
Although it can be important to consider a given issue from multiple angles, each of these behavior types may have the effect of slowing down the meeting’s progress and preventing important decisions from being reached. Let’s apply our previous discussion of issues with individuals dominating conversations to identify strategies that facilitators and individual meeting participants can use to mitigate these issues.
Identifying Strategies (10 minutes)
In the Etherpad, share one or more ideas for how a Facilitator could help resolve issues arising from participants’ indecision or argumentativeness. Also add one idea for how a regular meeting participant can contribute to resolving these issues.
The group will likely come up with a few of the strategies below (as well as others we haven’t thought of!). The meeting Facilitator should highlight the strategies the group has identified, including any recurring themes, while adding any from the list below that have been missed.
Facilitator Strategies
- Clarify the decision stage, ideally at the start of the agenda item. Is this item being raised for initial brainstorming, or is a decision needed today?
- Clarify consequences of delay. What happens if the decision isn’t made today?
- Set decision making rules in advance. We will discuss this in detail later in this lesson.
- Ask participants to restrict comments to those that add new information or concerns.
- Summarise and test for consensus (e.g. “It sounds like there is general agreement about X, but a concern about Y. Is that a fair summary?”)
- Ask participants to be specific about risk levels. How likely is the scenario they are raising? If it does occur, how critical would it be?
- Redirect details to asynchronous follow-up.
Participant Strategies
- Avoid performing “devil’s advocacy” unless explicitly invited.
- State your own position before critiquing others’.
- Acknowledge when the discussion is becoming too detail-oriented (e.g. “Is this something we can follow-up on async?”)
- Volunteer to handle implementation details outside of the meeting.
- Offer synthesis to help clarify possible directions (e.g. “It sounds like the two paths forward are A and B.”)
Proactively Handling Disruptive Behavior
Dealing with disruptions can be scary, especially if you are not the most senior person in the room, but the other meeting participants rely on you, as the Facilitator, to bring the meeting back on track. Most of the times this can be done in a gentle, non-confrontational manner using a two-step intervention:
- First, interrupt, if necessary, and state your observation of what is happening. E.g. “We are getting a bit of track here and are no longer talking about our objective.”
- Second, suggest a constructive way forward. E.g. “Let us refocus, the question we were discussing was… Who can suggest a solution?”
However, if this is not successful, it might be necessary to be firmer in calling out the disruption. Address the disrupting person by name, and tell them what to do or stop doing. For example, “Tina, please don’t interrupt.”
For more actionable meeting facilitation strategies, we recommend checking out the Life Labs Learning two-page Meeting Course-Correction Guide.
Catering Decisions (Take 1)
Pretend you are a participant at the short meeting segment recorded in this video. What disruptive behaviors do you notice? Does the facilitator make any attempts to address these disruptive behaviors? If so, how? How do you feel at the end of this meeting?
Some disruptive behaviors that participants may notice are:
- Interrupting each other (a lot).
- One participant walking away from the desk without notice / answering a phone call during the meeting.
- No one raising hands.
- Being dismissive of others’ concerns (around food allergy safety, vegetarian options).
- Eating on the call / talking with their mouth full.
- Not keeping microphone on mute when not speaking / coughing sounds.
- General rudeness?
- Trying to over-ride the group’s decision after the meeting.
- Set explicit expectations and be ready to intervene gently then forcefully if disruptive behaviours recur.
- Invite and make space for contributions from meeting participants.
- Reinforce and attribute the contributions of marginalised individuals.
Content from Note Taking
Last updated on 2026-09-01 | Edit this page
Estimated time: 45 minutes
Overview
Questions
- What information is important to capture during a meeting?
- Why are humans the best note takers?
Objectives
At the end of this episode, participants will be able to…
- Succinctly capture decisions, action items, owners, and deadlines in meeting notes.
- Describe why human-curated notes are worth investing effort into.
So you’ve been designated the Notetaker for a meeting - what does that mean? Do you need to try to type every word that is spoken? How do you make sure you’re capturing the right information? To answer this question, it’s useful to first focus on what the goal(s) are for having a Notetaker, which are (at least) two-fold:
- Make a record of decisions that were made, and any significant dissent that was raised.
- Keep track of any follow-up action items (including who is responsible for them and what the deadlines are!).
Depending on the formality of the meeting (e.g. a Board meeting), you may also have an obligation to provide an official record of the meeting, who attended, and what was discussed and decided.
Note Taking in Public
We strongly recommend that note taking for your meetings take place in a document that is accessible to everyone invited to the meeting (for example a shared Google doc). If everyone can see notes being taken in real time, the Notetaker will be motivated to actually take notes. In addition, other participants will be able to help out by adding information that is missed, or correcting a point they made if they notice it being misrepresented in the notes.
Why Your Notetaker Should be a Human
You may be wondering why you should bother to take notes at all. After all, most, if not all, video conferencing systems now enable automated note taking with GenAI tools. The makers of these tools claim they can capture conversations, record action items, and circulate meeting notes to participants, without you having to do any of the work! Although these tools are becoming more popular, we strongly advise against relying on them, and urge careful consideration before deciding to use them in your meetings at all. There are a number of reasons to instead trust your note taking duties to a human, including security and privacy, quality, and usefulness of the resulting notes.
Security and Privacy
Although these points have been made in many other venues, it bears repeating that commercially available AI note taking software is a commercial product, built to make money for its creators. Depending on the terms of service for a particular platform, this often means that your meeting data, including the whole meeting transcript, is exposed to the company that owns the tool. This can raise significant issues for confidentiality, data ownership, and copyright. Enabling AI note-taking agents on your video calls can also lead to situations where meeting transcripts, summaries, or recordings are automatically sent to meeting participants, invitees, or mailing lists - including un-official pre- or post-meeting discussions that may have been “off the record”!
Quality
Because all AI tools are dependent on their training data, AI note
takers often perform more poorly when speakers have accents different
from the majority language community used for training. In effect, this
means that meeting participants who are not native speakers of American
or British English will be disadvantaged by many popular AI notetakers.
The note taking tool may “mishear” a word, phrase, or entire sentence
and backfill that information with probabilistic slop.
A note taking tool is also likely to make mistakes in capturing
technical terms, field-specific jargon, or company internal terminology,
and again, will make up filler to compensate. A human note taker is more
likely to ask questions when they are uncertain about what has been
said!
Usefulness
With the exception of a few very specialised types of meetings, notes should not be a transcript of the meeting. Instead, they should be a record that clearly and concisely lays out the important points of conversation, decisions made, and action steps needing follow up. An attentive meeting participant is much more capable of extracting meaning from a conversation. Humans are also more likely to correctly identify things like sarcasm, irony, and meaning-laden pauses and therefore to avoid recording a sarcastic comment as a serious decision. Furthermore, if note taking is socialised as a shared responsibility within your meeting group’s culture, other participants are more likely to make corrections and clarifications to the notes in real time, when they notice the note taker has missed or misunderstood something.
Other
Building expectations around shared note taking responsibilities and norms not only gives you clearer, more actionable notes at the end of your meeting - it also ensures a baseline level of critical engagement during the meeting. At the very least, your note taker and backup need to be paying attention, and other meeting participants are likely to be paying enough attention to at least make sure their opinions are accurately captured in the notes!
AI Notetakers and Accessibility
Although we do not recommend relying on AI tools for record keeping, that doesn’t mean AI notetakers are useless! AI notetakers can be useful tools, particularly for Deaf or Hard of Hearing individuals, and for people for whom the meeting language is not their primary language. We recommend allowing AI notetakers on a case-by-case basis if requested by a meeting participant for accessibility reasons.
How to Take Good Notes
Let’s dig more deeply into what kind of information should be recorded in your meeting notes. To get us started, let’s test out your current note taking technique with an exercise.
Catering Decisions (Take 2)
As an individual, pretend you are the Notetaker for the short meeting segment recorded in this video. Watch the recording one time only, and type out whatever information you think is important to be recorded in the notes. Share your notes with a partner and compare. What did you both agree was important? Were there any pieces of information that you captured that your partner didn’t, or vice versa?
A possible set of notes from this meeting might be:
- Erin: Options are food trucks or venue catering. Deadline to tell venue is end of the week.
- Angelique: Food trucks had long lines and ran out of food.
- Toby: Food trucks were really good. Venue options are boring.
- Rob: Food trucks were good but allergy situation last year. Venue catering would have ingredients list. Safer.
- Angelique: Venue catering would require us to track orders. Complicated.
- Erin: No - venue catering is a set order in advance.
- Rob: What about vegetarian/vegan and gluten free options?
- Erin: Different set menus available.
- Toby: We don’t need to decide on the exact order right now.
- Erin: Correct - just need to decide on venue vs. food trucks.
- Toby: In favor of food trucks. More variety and more interactive.
- Angelique: Overlap with Ramadan. Need take-away options.
- Rob: Agree with Angelique. Vote for venue catering.
- Erin: Three votes for venue option. That’s what we’re doing. Need vegetarian opinion on final order.
- Angelique: Want to help decide final menu.
- Erin: Will tell the venue we’re using their catering. Will send Angelique and Rob menu options. Get choices back to me by Tuesday?
- Rob: Busy week - can’t look at whole menu set.
- Angelique: Can narrow down the options and send to you to review.
- Rob: Ok!
- Erin: Adjourns meeting.
Action items:
- Notify venue will use their catering for the conference. (Erin, by end of week)
- Send Angelique all menu options in our budget. (Erin, asap)
- Narrow down option list and send to Rob for final selections. (Angelique, ?)
- Send final choices to Erin. (Rob, Tuesday?)
Participants who are really paying attention may notice that the deadlines for all of the sub-tasks between Erin’s “I’ll send you a list of menu options” and “Please get me your decisions by Tuesday” weren’t discussed. Angelique and Rob would need to coordinate outside of the meeting on when they need to complete their individual review steps. They may also need to more explicitly decide who is sending the final menu selections to Erin. Depending on the complexity of the task, the number of intermediate steps, and how frequently these individuals work together, that may be fine, or you may want to detail these responsibilities during the meeting time.
You and your partner may have captured different levels of detail, and that’s ok! Hopefully, you both identified most of the following key elements:
- decisions reached (and vote counts if appropriate),
- what follow-up actions were agreed upon,
- who is responsible for each action item, and
- what the deadline is for their completion.
Action items can either be collected into a list at the bottom of the meeting notes, or called to attention with special formatting (e.g. highlighting). Either way, they should be quickly findable by someone skimming the notes.
Additional items that are good to capture in the notes if possible include:
- major points of opposition or dissent,
- concerns, cautionary points, or alternative paths forward.
Meeting notes should also include the date and time of the meeting and a list of participants. This makes it easier to answer questions later that may arise about who the decision-makers were on a particular issue. If possible, end your meetings at least 5-10 minutes before the scheduled stop time. This gives your notetaker time to consolidate the action item list and gives everyone else a few minutes for a bio break before their next meeting. In our experience, very few people have ever been unhappy about a meeting ending early!
- There are several good reasons to dedicate human attention to producing good meeting notes.
- Notes shouldn’t be a full transcript of the meeting, but rather an attempt to capture important elements like decisions and follow-up needed.
Content from Making decisions
Last updated on 2026-09-01 | Edit this page
Estimated time: 45 minutes
Overview
Questions
- How can I make sure meetings end with important decisions having been made?
- How do I harness participant’s energy and opinions into concrete decision making?
Objectives
TBD
In most meetings, at least some agenda items will be ones on which decisions need to be made in order to keep work moving forward, or to meet deadlines. If none of the items on your agenda require decision making from the group, you should reconsider whether it is useful to have the meeting at all. As discussed previously, information dissemination is usually not an appropriate reason to hold a meeting. Information can be circulated by email instead, without interrupting peoples’ work.
Given that there are agenda items requiring decision-making, you should be clear about what the role of the meeting participants is in striking a decision. We go into depth in how to establish decision making roles and responsibilities in another course in this series (Collaboration on Remote Teams). In brief, items placed on the agenda should be there because the participants at this meeting have some level of decision making role in their resolution. That might be as an advisory body, or as an official body whose decisions are binding. The individuals at this meeting were invited because you believe that this group of people are likely to have useful insight and expertise in helping make these decisions. They may also be included because they will be impacted by the decision, and therefore have a stake in carrying it out.
The difficulty of coming to consensus seems to raise exponentially with the number of meeting participants - so how can you ensure that decisions that need to be made actually get made and not deferred to a future meeting? We recommend that meetings adopt a modified version of Martha’s Rules, which are designed to allow groups to make progress without requiring strict consensus.
Martha’s Rules and Culture
The designers of Martha’s Rules note that their success is dependent on the culture of the group implementing them. In particular, successful implementation requires that participants be:
- Willing and able to listen to others,
- Trusting enough of the group to voice their opinions,
- Invested in the group’s welfare and,
- Willing to adopt other’s proposals in lieu of their own.
Our Collaboration on Remote Teams course delves into how team leaders can nurture these aspects of culture within their team, but some of the methods we’ve already discussed in this course go a long way towards establishing this culture. For instance, participants will be more willing to listen to others if they know that their right to share their opinion is being safeguarded by the Facilitator. Martha’s Rules also call for agenda items to be set and shared in advance of the meeting, and for each to have an associated time limit. You’re already well prepared for those elements!
The Steps
There are five steps to Martha’s rules, although the designers note that these five steps do not need to be followed exactly, and should be modified based on the group’s needs. The five steps are:
- Preparation,
- Generating proposals,
- Making proposals concrete,
- Taking a “sense” vote, and
- Taking a “vote” vote.
We’ve already covered the preparation steps, so let’s talk about generating proposals.
Evaluating Multiple Proposals
Exercise about implementing Martha’s Rules - could we use the table from the publication and ask the group which proposals should move forward to the next stage?
Solution text here.
TDB