Please recall that an Agenda and a Minutes should be prepared for all meetings between a senior design team and its faculty advisor. Students should rotate preparation of minutes and agendas. Each student should do one of each every quarter.

Be sure that the Minutes lists the new action items assigned during the meeting (including the person responsible and the date due), and the Agenda lists all the outstanding action items. Also please include the name of the person who prepared the document on each Agenda and Minutes.

Minutes and Agendas should be uploaded to CSNS by the person who prepared them.

Thanks.

Message from John Hurley:

CS 496 students, the writing requirements for 496A include the design document, a personal observation essay, and weekly meeting agendas and minutes.  The design document will use a specialized format; I think most of you will be using the same format you used in CS337.  I will send separate messages about the meeting minutes and personal observation essays soon. The rest of this message concerns the meeting agendas.

Meetings of every kind tend to be disorganized and inefficient.  An agenda imposes discipline by supplying a plan.  You should use the agenda to make sure you discuss everything that needs to be considered and as a map to help everyone move in the correct direction.  The net effect of a good agenda is to reduce the workload by making sure the meeting does not waste anyone's time.

The most efficient way to plan an agenda is probably for one student to design an agenda in advance in consultation with a faculty advisor, then let the group discuss any additions or changes at the beginning of the meeting.  Give some thought to the order in which agenda items should be discussed.  If some decisions must be made or some information presented before other matters can be considered, the agenda items should be in the correct order.

I have attached two sample meeting agendas.  Do not be concerned with the content of the sample agendas, which is not related to our field; just pay attention to the formats, which are simple and informal.  You may also use a more formal or more detailed format if you wish.  For our meetings, the final agenda item should usually be to make sure that everyone in the group knows what s/he is responsible for in the time between this meeting and the next meeting.  Also, if a particular person is in charge of an agenda item, that should be clear on the agenda.

I will grade the agendas using our rubric (formal set of grading criteria) for written communication. The aspects of the rubric that are most relevant to the agendas are general document organization, the content of each section, and sentence structure.  I will evaluate general document organization by considering whether the agenda topics are appropriate, well thought-out to avoid overlap, and in a sensible order.  The most important aspect of section content in this case is whether each item is clearly expressed.  Those of you who are not native English speakers may have difficulty with sentence structure.  I will take this into account in the grading, but speak with me or with your faculty advisor if you need help.

Attachments

1.         typical-meeting-agenda.jpg 
2.         oni_sample_agenda.pdf
3.         SampleSafetyMeetingAgenda.pdf