Neighbourhood Forums should keep a record of decisions taken at public meetings and committee meetings. You do not need to keep a word-for-word record. Meeting notes need only include:
- the date and venue of the meeting
- a list of who was present, who sent apologies (for committee meetings) and who chaired the meeting (see the template for recording attendance at www.theneighbourhood.info)
- a brief description of the discussion under the headings of the main subjects on the agenda, details of what decisions were made and who was asked to take action as a result.
Once the notes of a meeting have been drawn up and circulated, they are ‘draft minutes’. Draft minutes are not the accepted record of what happened at a meeting. Apart from being circulated to members for approval, they should not be published and when they are circulated the word ‘DRAFT’ should appear prominently on each page.
Draft minutes become the accepted account of a meeting when they approved by:
- the members, in the case of a public meeting
- the committee members, in the case of a committee meeting.
Once they are approved by the relevant group, they can be called the minutes of the meeting and published and circulated publicly as such. Note: given that the period between public meetings may be several months, the committee could take the step of approving the draft minutes of a public meeting. They would remain draft minutes (because they have not been approved by members as a whole), but could be published as ‘draft minutes which have been approved by the committee’.
Once the minutes of a meeting have been agreed, the next task of the group is to take reports on ‘matters arising’ from those minutes. This is, in effect, a progress update on the actions listed in the minutes by the people listed as responsible for them. The chair can alternatively decide to deal with any matters arising under another item on the agenda which is relevant to the action in question.
The Secretary isn’t necessarily the minute-taker
The person who takes notes at a meeting need not be the Secretary elected by committee members but can be anyone , including a non-member, who the committee agrees should do the job.