Content from Introduction
Last updated on 2026-02-24 | Edit this page
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.
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.
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
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) - Patricia
The 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
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 2026-02-27 | Edit this page
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.
Forming the Fellowship of the Ring
Setting
You’ve just gotten back from a project kick-off meeting yesterday. It ran too long, the agenda seemed aimless and no-one stuck to it, and Gimli rambled for far too long on tangential topics.
You’re part of the RSE sub-team in the project, and you’re determined that your meetings will NOT be death-by-powerpoint and that Gimli will talk about as long as everyone else in the team, no longer.
Now you’re in the team meeting. Gimli is talking about the project tracker you should be using, and he’s spent fifteen minutes explaining how good the Mithril Project manager (tm) is. Legolas would like to use the Lembas project tacking method, and you can’t quite seem to get a word in edgewise.
Exercise
- Discuss in small groups (or write down, if you’re working solo):
- What types of disruptions are these? See the NOAA resource for more different types of disruptors and how to deal with them.
- What might be a good way to handle this?
- Assign the roles of Gimli and Legolas to two team members. Have a chair role-play how to redirect and defuse this type of difficult behaviour.
Thinking about the exercise: What went well? What was hard? Interrupting when a meeting isn’t “going right” isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be hard. Some points to remember:
- Address disruptions in two ways.
- At the time the disruption happens, make sure the behaviour is stopped.
- After the meeting, make sure that you look at systemic ways to reduce that type of disruption as well - e.g. if you always run over time, consider assigning a standard “timekeeper” role to every meeting.
- Practice can make it easier to interrupt, but be aware of power dynamics: it’s one thing to stop a disagreement when you’re chairing a meeting, but it might (or might not) be wise to interrupt someone who is in a much “higher” position in a hierarchy, if they aren’t receptive to feedback.
- If you do have power or privilege (e.g. you’re a chair, or you’re a member of an in-group), make sure to use that power and privelege to support marginalised members. Sometimes it could be as simple as repeating what another person said and attributing it to the original speaker.
- 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 2026-02-27 | Edit this page
Overview
Questions
- What information is important to capture during a meeting?
Objectives
TBD
TDB
Content from Making decisions
Last updated on 2025-05-15 | Edit this page
Overview
Questions
- TBD
Objectives
TBD
TDB