Meetings

Meetings in Teralo are the agenda, the minutes and the actions in one record, with each meeting in a series carrying forward from the last. The thing that makes the tool worth using is not the note taking, it is that an item raised in March is still visible in June with its original meeting number on it.

The register

Meetings opens on three views.

Calendar shows meetings on the dates they happen, colour coded: amber for awaiting minutes, green for minutes issued, and a separate marker for a scheduled occurrence of a recurring meeting.

List is the ordinary register, with the meeting number, type, title, date, status and author.

Actions is every action item from every meeting on the project in one place, with its meeting, description, responsibility, due date, priority, status and meeting type. This is the view people actually live in between meetings.

Actions assigned to you also appear in My Items.

Setting a meeting up

Choose the meeting type first: it sets the numbering series and, where the type has a template, populates the agenda structure. Then the title, date, start and end times, and a location, which takes an address or an online meeting link.

Overview is a short note about the meeting's purpose. Tick Recurring meeting and pick a frequency of Daily, Weekly, Fortnightly or Monthly where the meeting is a standing one.

Attendees are picked from the project, and each one carries an attendance status:

Present, meaning they were there.
Absent, meaning they were expected and were not.
Distribution, meaning they were never expected to attend but should receive the minutes.

That third status is the one worth knowing about, because it is how a client or a head office gets the minutes without appearing to have skipped every meeting.

Agenda and minutes

The agenda is a set of sections, which can be nested, each holding items. Where the meeting type has a template, the sections arrive already built.

An item carries a description, who is responsible, a priority of Low, Medium, High or Critical, a due date and a status of Open, On Hold, Ongoing or Closed. Items also take comments, so discussion between meetings has somewhere to go that is not email.

An item carried forward from an earlier meeting shows the note it carried and the number of the meeting it originally came from, so its age is visible rather than something you have to work out.

Attachments can be added to the meeting or to an individual item, and each one can be marked Carry forward so it comes across to the next meeting.

Issuing minutes and following up

A meeting sits at Awaiting Minutes until somebody issues them, at which point it becomes Minutes.

Once minutes are issued, Create follow-up builds the next meeting in the series. It copies the attendees, the section structure, every item that is not closed, the attachments marked to carry forward and the distribution list, gives it the next number in that type's series, and leaves the date for you to set.

This is the reason to close items properly. Anything still open is on the next agenda automatically, and anything closed is not.

Three things come off a meeting record, from the meeting's own action row.

PDF exports the meeting as minutes: agenda, attendance, items and actions.

ICS downloads a calendar file, so the meeting lands in Outlook, Google Calendar or whatever the attendee uses.

QR Sign-in shows a code. An attendee scans it and is marked as signed in to the meeting from their phone, which is faster and more reliable than a sheet passed down a table. Where a paper sheet was used anyway, photographs of it can be attached to the meeting as sign-in photos.

SettingsHost only

Meetings is configured under Organisation, then Tools, then Meetings and Project, then Tools, then Meetings. See Organisation level and project level.

Meeting types are what you configure, and each one carries a prefix used in its numbering. Teralo ships Design Coordination, Site Progress, Safety Committee, Client Progress and Subcontractor Coordination, which most organisations edit rather than replace.

Each type can carry a template: a nested set of agenda sections that every meeting of that type starts from. Building one is worth the ten minutes. A standing agenda is what stops the minutes of the same meeting looking different depending on who took them, and it is what makes a run of meetings comparable a year later.

Project-level settings add project-specific types alongside the organisation's.

PermissionsHost only

Five permissions, and one of them behaves differently from anything else in Teralo.

Viewing meetings covers all meetings on the project, but an attendee can always see a meeting they are on regardless of it. Being invited is enough. This is deliberate: a subcontractor invited to a coordination meeting should not need broad access to the project's meeting register to read their own minutes.

Creating, editing and deleting meetings are separate, and managing meeting actions is separate again, so somebody can chase and close actions without being able to edit the minutes they came from.

See How permissions work.