jmunroe
commented
1 year ago I agree we should have note taking as a separate from those actively participating in or facillitating the meeting. This would be very worth the cost.
Would manual note-taking be an example toil we want should try to avoid?
While a human note-taker would be nice, I'd like to give some of these software tools at least some consideration too, e.g. otter.ai, tldv.io.
I take a fair number of meetings during my work in addition to 'team meetings' so I think this technology could be worth adopting. I understand that AI based models are not great but I think there must be services (stenographers?) where a human can review and improve an automated transcription if it that was needed after the fact.
Are there other concerns with using AI based tools for note-taking that I may not be considering?
Could we first try automating the scheduling of meetings with automatic recording to produce of meetings transcripts ? If a human still required due to a poor transcription then we could iterate on the process.
yuvipanda
Context
We have a few recurring topical meetings (such as the product & eng meeting) where some subset of team members will be synchronously participating in discussions. Because the earth is not flat, and priorities differ, there will always be folks who are both interested in the content and have a vested interest in knowing what was discussed, but not actually present in the meeting.
Note-taking of what was said is an important part of being inclusive in this async context. However, currently, the person taking notes is often a participant in the meeting as well. This does a disservice to both the note-taker (as they can not fully participate) as well as the people not in the meeting who read the notes (as notes might be incomplete). In some cases, note taking falls often onto historically marginalized people in a group, just as a reflection of the power structures we live in. In other cases, unintentionally selective note taking can provide a different picture than what actually happened.
Our current status quo is that often these meetings do not have complete notes that fully make sense to people who weren't in the meeting. Asking people to participate and take notes is a bit too much, so let's fix this.
Proposal
We should pay someone to come to these recurring meetings and take notes verbatim. I would like this to be a human, and not an AI, and we should compensate them for their time appropriately. We can provide guidelines for what kinda notetaking we want. Ideally this would be someone consistent and recurring, so we can develop some kind of relationship with them too.