# How to Minute Guide
###### tags: `Handover`
#### By Freyja, 2021 UniSFA Secretary

### What's the deal with Minuting?
The purpose of minuting is to record the proceedings of committee meetings, and inform members of the club of decisions that committee has made.

"If it wasn't minuted, it didn't happen. 
If it was minuted, it happened." 
- Alistair Langton, Unigames President 2020-2021

### What needs to be minuted?
- you can take a look at some of my minutes to get an idea of this
- Unigames minutes are also worth checking out if you have time, they do some things differently but the general rules are the same

You should record:
- decisions made by committee
- If it wasn't minuted it didn't happen
- important points of dicussion that members and future committees should have record of
- This is quite subjective and not necessarily critical, but it is useful to improve the flow of information
- summary of what was discussed (even if there were no outcomes or important points)
- the members deserve to know what committee talks about
- action items (these are tasks that people need to get done)
- attendance of the meeting
- apologies sent by committee members who can't attend the meeting
- scheduled start time of the meeting
- actual start time of the meeting
- end time of the meeting
- date of the meeting
- reports submitted by committee members
- actions of committee over the past week

### How to use HackMD
HackMD is a collaborative markdown writing software, similar to google docs but writing in the markdown format.

The left screen is the unprocessed markdown text that you actually write in, and the right screen is the formatted final product that's pretty enough to give to members.

#### Markdown
Markdown is a programming language (I don't know enough about programming to know if that's actually true, so don't be intimidated by it) that's used for things like formatting text. It's what is used in discord and websites (actually that might be html but the same rules apply to formatting as far as I can tell)

You can look at the two sides of the screen to tell how it's translated.
- dot point
- subpoint
- you get the picture
1. List (I don't use these)
2. List numbering is automatic
3. But sublists are not automatically separated

>action item
> action item

- more about action items later

*italics* (I don't use this)
**bold** (I don't use this but it's an alternative to using heading 4 for attendance and meeting open and close times)
***bold and italics*** (I don't use this)
~~strikethrough~~ (I use this on occassion)
# heading 1 (for document title)
## heading 2 (for agenda items)
### heading 3 (for sub items)
#### heading 4 (for sub items and meeting opening and closing times and attendance)
##### heading 5 (I very rearely use this)
###### heading 6 (I put my tags in this)
`tags (these are used for sorting documents)`
ABC^supertext^ ^(like sqared, I use this for camp title only, doesn't work with spaces)^
(brackets)
[square brackets] (this has some autofill things, ignore them)
{curly brackets}
[embeded hyperlink/URL](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ) (warning: this is a rickroll) (I don't know what the difference between URLs and hyperlink is)
There's a bunch of other things I've never interacted with
- [ ] checklist
- [x] checkedlist

codeblock

Tables:
| Column 1 | Column 2 |
| ----------- | ----------- |
| text | I don't use these and I'm not 100% sure how it works |
| text | I don't know why this row is shaded |

you can also do emojis if you know the code for them (not all are available)

:thinking: :angry: :+1: :sob: :pleading_face:

Horizontal line: (line above gets partially heading-ified unless you add another line between idk, I don't use this)
---

#### Minute sharing and publishing
You will need to make sure to check all of these each time, we can't be sharing the edit link and letting people change the minutes

##### General Setup
- There is a HackMD account for UniSFA that owns a HackMD team, it can be logged into using Google
1. Create a HackMD account of your own
2. Use the UniSFA account to add yours to the team
- you can now access minutes on your account
- this is useful for having multiple people logged into minutes at once
- use your own account, as it can track edits to the document that way
- All notes should be made as team notes
3. Copy the folder "minutes" within the "minutes/agendas" folder on the private section of the google drive onto your computer, and download Python from the internet
- optional, but necessary for the simplified minutes-processing method found later on. you may do this manually instead.
- If you're not secretary and don't minute often this isn't worth it
- the folder in question should contain two files
- actionFinder.py
- pysftp-0.2.9.tar.gz

##### Ahead of the meeting
1. Open the minutes for the meeting, or create one and replicate the format if there isn't
2. Bully the rest of committee into submitting their reports ahead of time
- they won't :sob:
4. Go to sharing and set it to read for everyone
- you may set edit access however you like, but if you give the rest of committee edit access they will touch your minutes
- Also note that anyone in the HackMD team counts as an owner and can always edit
5. share the url (NOT THE SHARE LINK) to the rest of committee to allow them to connect to the minutes live
- optional

##### During the meeting
1. Take attendance
2. Record the start time of the meeting
3. Take notes as described above as the chair (the president normally) runs through the agenda
- record action items whenever someone is a assigned a task
- If using actionFinder.py, you must read the section about action items later on for it to work
- If there is a closed section, none of what occurs should be minuted, however you must record that a closed section occured
- If the committee makes a decision to excersice committee powers during the closed section, this must still be minuted
5. Record the end time of the meeting

##### After the meeting
- If you don't feel like processing the minutes, you can just send the secretary the link and they'll do it
###### Using actionFinder.py
1. Go to the menu and download the minutes as a markdown file
2. Put that file in the minutes folder with actionFinder.py
3. Open the command prompt of your computer (type command into cortana and it should find it)
4. type "dir" and then hit enter to see a list of folders on your computer
5. type "cd" followed by a single space and then the exact name of a folder to open it
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you've opened the minutes folder
7. type "python actionFinder.py [name of downloaded document including the .md]"
8. Copy from the list produced inside command prompt or open the .md folder using notepad to copy the list of action items found at the end of the document
9. Paste this onto the end of the minutes in HackMD and format as necessary

###### Formatting for actionFinder.py

in order to use actionFinder.py, action items must be written as follows:

>[name]: [task]
or
>[name], [name]: [task] (for cooperative action items)

There must not be a space after '>'

Past Action items and the outputs of actionFinder.py should be left with the space so that they are not processed as current action items. As such, any incomplete action items should be added again as new action items using the above syntax.

###### Without actionFinder.py
1. manually compile action item list for each committee member at the end of the document

##### Publishing minutes
1. once you've processed the minutes using one of the above methods, change the share settings so that comments are disabled (under more) and set edit access to owners only if it is not already like that
2. Press 'publish' in the share section
3. Double check step 1
4. Copy the share link from the share section and post that link to the #minutes channel of the discord together with the date of the meeting
- you can write 'featuring: insert funny line that happened in the meeting here'

##### If you're feeling especially nice/mean:
1. copy the action items list into the commmittee facebook group and/or #committee-business channel of discord and tag everyone
2. post the published minutes share link to the public facebook group
3. idk bud, whatever seems about right I guess