Reducing Wasted Motion at a Conference: Collaborative Note Taking

Mark,

I have done collaborative note taking many times. I had one specific weekly meeting for a non-profit and the agendas were posted on google docs. We all had the opportunity to add to or edit the agendas in advance. We had rules like bold the important items, put question marks by the items we might not need to discuss… I owned the agenda in this case so I would check any notes and take appropriate action before the meeting.

During the meeting we all had digital devices ranging from laptops to phones (google has a great drive app) open to look at the agenda. This was a face to face meeting, but could work for any meeting format. We would take all notes on the agenda. We would generally have one note taker and everybody else could make sure what was typed was accurate and would correct or add to it.

This worked great, and we used this same format every week for over 1 year. I have since moved so I don’t participate any more, but I believe it follows the same format now.

I think taking this concept to a conference is a great idea. I would probably have a limited number of note takers, and have a bunch of editors, and anybody could add comments or thoughts that were spurred from the talk, but didn’t come directly from the talk in a separate section.

A standard format could be helpful also for each speaker. IE would each speaker have their own document or would they all be in one document…?