Re: Org mode for meeting minutes

[Adam Spiers]

On Thu, 31 Oct 2019 at 14:04, Christian Egli <christian.egli@sbs.ch> wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I'd like to revisit a very old thread[1] where Adam Spiers asks if there
> is support in Org mode for
>
> 1. Allow *fast* production of meeting agendas and minutes, exportable in
>    a good-looking legible format which non-org readers can digest.
>
> 2. Allow minutes to be taken as the meeting progresses, minimising the
>    amount of work required after the meeting.
>
> 3. Allow actions to be captured and then automatically extracted into a
>    simple tabulated report which clearly shows actions grouped by owner.
>
> 4. Track progress of actions *after* the minutes have been issued.

Wow, this makes me feel old! ;-)

Sorry for chiming in late - only just noticed this thread.

> He goes on to say that org mode handles (1) and (2) just fine, but he
> wasn't sure about (3) and (4).
>
> His mail is from 2008 and a lot has happened in the mean time. I would
> suggest that today (1) and (2) can be handled with normal org export or
> even pandoc. Inline tasks[2] help a lot to add, well inline tasks. For (3)
> and (4) he mentions a dynamic block that could collect all action items.
>
> I never found that dynamic block he mentions, so I hacked one up (which
> was suprisingly easy). I haven't packaged it but the gist of it is
> below:

[snip]

I have no doubt that your modern solution is much better than my ancient
hack, but just for the record, the latter can be found here:

https://github.com/aspiers/emacs/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.d/as-gtd.el#L79-L117

Thanks a lot for re-raising this and subsequently writing a very nice blog
post about it too!

Cheers,
Adam

P.S. I recently discovered an exceptionally good service to aid
with capturing information from meetings:

   https://otter.ai/

Sadly it is proprietary, and the speech recognition is sophisticated
enough that I doubt that any FLOSS alternative will appear any time
soon :-(