Loomio for a board of directors — minutes as threads?

I'm trying out Loomio to coordinate the work of a board of directors spanning 21 hours of time difference. We have regular video meetings, and so one of the things I want to put on Loomio are the meeting minutes.

If you've done this before, and you have any insights you think might be worth sharing, I'd really appreciate that.

Would each meeting's minutes become a thread of their own? Or is it better to have a thread for "Minutes" and just add to that? The reason I am asking this is because I was a bit confused by the dialog that opened after I had created the first thread, asking me to invite people to this thread. What if I don't invite anyone? Do I need to?

Having a thread per meeting seems logical. Now members can dismiss them individually, and they already show up with the newest first. Using tags, all minutes can be kept logically grouped.

Or is this the wrong way of looking at Loomio, and should threads be regarded more of a higher-level context? If so, can posts in a thread be sorted in reverse-chronological order?

Sorry if this is a bit of a newbie question, but that's what I am! :angel_tone2:

Hi Martin. Based on the experience of our aub-groups in Gene Keys Society. I would certainly use just one thread for minutes and notices for meeting times. And as Robert suggests @mention all who need to know about the meetings and read the minutes.

Hi @madduck.

Thanks for the feedback, I think we'll stop showing the "invite to thread" screen immediately after starting a thread - it leads to it being used incorrectly. If you start a thread (and don't invite anyone), Loomio will show it to group members in their daily summary email and within groups in the UI. "Invite to thread" is best for "guests" who are just invited into the thread because they are a subject expert, but it can also be used instead of mentioning. I want to double down on using at-mentions to immediately notify people within the group, including being able to at-mention a whole group.

This is work that will happen in the next few weeks with the direction of making Loomio more familiar and similar to other tools.

I think the notify/invite modal is best for when you've started a proposal, that's usually significant enough that it deserves it's own email notification, and it's nice because it's got the buttons and everything - giving you the feeling you can vote from within your email.

In answer to your question:
In the past we have used a single thread for minutes, and at-mentioned people with the actions they have committed to. I think a thread for a meeting is a good idea though.. If you start a thread to say we've got a meeting coming up, gather input for it, set a time, then post minutes and follow up, the thread can keep all of that together... however if you don't do all that other stuff on Loomio then a thread just for minutes makes sense too.

Does that help?

Dear @robertguthrie, thank you for the quick response. I've played around a bit more in a test setup, and I think a thread-per-meeting makes more sense.

In fact, I was thinking that one way to do this would be to actually make individual discussion items on the agenda be separate posts in the thread, such that they can be commented on, and even forked, individually. And it'd be trivial to bestow minute-taking to another party for an agenda item.

But for this to really make sense, I think post order should be manually controllable, i.e. I should be able to move items around, change the order, promote replies, and demote posts to the main thread. Is this something you could envision?

Alternatively, if we prefer to stick to the "all minutes in one post" approach, then it would be great to be able to comment on individual paragraphs, similar to how Github allows you to comment on lines and commits. Do you know what I mean?

Another way to go about this that I've considered would be to add Etherpad integration, similar to the existing decision tools. I.e. I'd add an Etherpad to a thread to take minutes in, and then after the meeting, I could simply persist the content into the thread.

I'd love to get your feedback on these ideas, some of which may be totallly outside the roadmap you have for Loomio at the moment.

Yeah! Two experimental features I'd love to research:

Collaborative editing -> There are a lot of people who want to collaborate on documents together on Loomio. I've got some ideas about how we can leverage some great open source tools to build a wysiwyg markdown collaborative editor right into Loomio, and provide a better composer experience too.

Annotations -> being able to highlight pieces of text and comment on them or react would be really great. I can imagine people highlighting key info from a multiple places in a thread then building a proposal based on these insights.