Meetings, minutes, and decisions

For the helpdesk team

Meetings

A meeting record carries everything a clerk would otherwise hold in a folder — agenda, attendees, papers, decisions, actions arising. The show page is the clerk’s working surface; the index is the historical view.

Meeting detail — the clerk's working surface with agenda, decisions, attendees, and papers in one view

Index

Filter by committee (top of page). Default view is newest-first. Each row shows the committee short code, meeting reference, date, chair and clerk, attendee count, and paper count.

Meeting status follows the lifecycle: scheduled → in_progress → concluded → minuted → approved → archived. If a meeting’s status is approved and is_published is true, it appears in the public meetings browse — readers can see the public summary, non-confidential papers, and the non-confidential decisions log.

Show

The per-meeting page is structured around the typical clerk’s workflow:

Header — committee, reference, date/time, location, chair, clerk, status.
Attendees — names + role, present/absent flag, apologies vs absence.
Agenda — list of items.
Papers — uploads. Mark each paper as public or confidential. Confidential papers are stripped before the public surface renders.
Decisions — each with a headline, resolution text, outcome (carried / rejected / deferred / noted) and a confidential flag. Vote tallies (for / against / abstain) are optional.
Actions arising — spawn a governance action directly from a carried decision. Each action has an owner and a due date.
Public summary — sanitised text shown to the public. Write this; the system doesn’t extract it from the minutes.

PDF export

The minutes pack exports as PDF via Browsershot. Headers, footers, and pagination follow the trust’s template. Confidential items are included in the agent export and excluded from the public-surface export — there’s no way to accidentally publish a confidential decision via the wrong button.

Gotchas

Approving a meeting freezes its content. To correct an approved meeting (e.g. a misnoted decision), the clerk has to re-open it via the workflow, edit, and re-approve. This is deliberate — minutes are a legal record.
Papers are uploaded against the meeting, not the committee — uploads don’t show in other meetings even if the topic recurs. Re-upload if it’s relevant again.
Actions arising create rows in the actions register that you can chase from there. Closing them in the actions register doesn’t automatically update this meeting; the meeting’s view just shows the latest action status.