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Regarding Carol Anne Wall's concerns about Tech Writers being required to
take meeting minutes:
I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here. Assuming you've dealt with the
image/politics/resource issues and will go ahead and accept responsibility
for the minutes, there's an approach you could take that might lighten the
administrative load and could possibly end up giving your group more clout.
Propose that the meetings also have an agenda (which your group will also
prepare), and require that participants get all agenda items to you by a
certain day/time before the meeting. Then, take an active role during the
meeting to ensure folks stick to the agenda; this can be tricky--it requires
diplomacy and finesse, and a knack for knowing when to let a non-agenda
thread spin and when to nip it in the bud.
Finally, in taking the minutes, concentrate on recording decisions made and
action items required (including who's responsible and due dates). That
should free you up some to actually participate in the meeting (ask
questions, clarify issues, etc.) The next time the same group meets, the
first item on the agenda should be a review of the action items. Plus, the
agenda can be used as the framework for the minutes (that's what we do
here--a "Save As" on the agenda file to make it the minutes file, then
modify accordingly).
Side note to Marilynne Smith (the TECHWR-Ler cursed with "simultaneous
transcription")--Did you really have to sit in on meetings that lasted 3 to
4 hours? <begin personal opinion, no flame intended> I think that's
ridiculous. In my experience, people's attention spans just do not last that
long, and the meeting ceases being productive after about the first hour and
a half. <end personal opinion, no flame intended>
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| Julie Pitt Digex, Inc. |
| ISO Implementation Coordinator One Digex Plaza |
| Digex Consulting Beltsville, MD 20705 |
+--------------------------------------------------+
| Julie -dot- Pitt -at- Digex -dot- com http://www.digex.com |
+--------------------------------------------------+
IPCC 01, the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference,
October 24-27, 2001 at historic La Fonda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
CALL FOR PAPERS OPEN UNTIL MARCH 15. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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