Organizing minutes of meetings for an association

10-19 Concepts 11 Core Concepts
1

I’m organizing my association’s files and have run into some issues with our minutes of meetings.

We basically have three types of meetings:

  • Annual meetings
  • Board meetings
  • Member meetings

In total we have about 8 of these per year. We have an archive going back 15 years and I want to build a system that lasts at least more years.

Each record will consist of at least three files (Word file, PDF export and signed scan), so I think each meeting should have its own ID.
The issues I’m having are the following:

  • Because it will span thirty years, I can’t create a category for each year without allocating 3 areas. (E.g. 30-69 Meetings) I think this takes too much unnecessary space; each category will only contain ~8 IDs.
  • Splitting into the three types of meetings gets me nowhere with the previous issue.
  • If I dedicate an area to meetings and use an additional digit (e.g. 300-399 Meetings) I could have 301 Meetings 2007, but the area would not sort very well. (300 would appear below 50)

The best I’ve come up with is

10-19 Governance
  11 Meetings
     11.01 Meetings 2007
        11.01 Annual meeting 2007
        11.01 Board meeting 2007-02-14
        11.01 Member meeting 2007-02-16
         …
      11.02 Meetings 2008
         …

So I break the rules by having multiples of the same ID. (But different names) Thinking about it now, I could maybe even do 11.2007 to more clearly indicate the difference. And perhaps expand it to

  • 11.2007.01 Annual meeting 2007
  • 11.2007.02 Board meeting 2007-02-14

Note though that the ID is chronological; could also have been 11.2007.01 Member meeting 2007-01-11.

Thoughts?

1 Like
2

In cases like this where date is the primary key – the most useful sorting value – I think it’s worth just using the date. Similar to how I use my 12 People & orgs category, you could still allocate IDs but put them at the end. That way any sorting issues are moot but you still get the benefit of an ID for use elsewhere.

10-19 Governance
   11 Meetings
      2007-01-01 Annual meeting [11.001]
      2007-02-14 Board meeting [11.002]
      2007-02-16 Member meeting [11.003]
      ...
      2023-07-03 Member meeting [11.261]

I’ve extended the three digits for the ID there, assuming 1,000 will cover it?

For ease of browsing you could pop a yyyy folder in 11 Meetings. But just keep the IDs as-is.

Your system should also work, this is one of those cases where you have to break the rules in the way that makes most sense in the brains of your users.

Hmm or if you’re confident that you’ll only have 8/year you could use an ID structure like:

  • 11. category
  • 07 year
  • xx ID

So you end up with 11.0701. Which is just your idea but shortened. Now your ID has a bit of semantics embedded. But you are limited to 9 meetings otherwise it gets messy. I don’t love that.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the input!

Just for clarification; with 11.0701, can’t there be 99 meetings in a year? (11.0799)
Or did I misunderstand something?

4

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Nope. I’m just a dummy.

5

Haha! I’ll probably go with that scheme then. It is both consistent with the overall structure, but distinct enough to accommodate the slightly different requirements. :+1: