Six months later, nobody opens the minutes to relive the debate. They open them to find out what was decided and who agreed to do what. Most minutes bury both inside paragraphs of who said what, which is why the answer to "was that agreed?" is so often an argument. This keeps the discussion short and the decisions and actions where they can be found, carried forward until they are done.
Actions from this meeting and from every meeting before it, until they are ticked off. This list is the reason anybody opens minutes.
Minutes are a record of decisions, not of conversation. The discussion belongs in them only so far as it explains why the decision went the way it did. Everything beyond that makes the decision harder to find, gives people something to dispute that does not matter, and takes an hour to write that nobody will spend. Two sentences of discussion and one clear resolution is a better minute than a page of who said what.
An action without a name and a date is a wish. "It was agreed that this should be looked into" commits nobody and will not be done. Every action here takes a person and a date, and the page says so when one is missing, because the missing name is the reason the same item appears at four meetings running.
Actions carry forward until somebody ticks them. The list at the bottom holds everything outstanding from every meeting, not just this one. That is what turns a set of minutes into a thing that runs an organisation rather than a thing that gets filed. Items overdue are marked, because the polite version of chasing is a list everybody can see.
Record who was not there for an item. Somebody leaving the room for a decision is a fact about that decision, and it is the one that gets asked about. So is a vote against, and an abstention. All three have their own place here, because writing them into the discussion paragraph is how they get missed.
It stays on this machine. Draft minutes are the most sensitive version of any document an organisation produces, and the one most likely to be read by somebody else later. They should not be typed into a form that posts somewhere. Export the JSON, keep it with the papers, and circulate the text.
Enough that somebody reading it in two years understands why the decision went that way, and no more. Where a member wants a particular view recorded, record it and say whose it was; that is a specific request and quite different from minuting the whole debate.
Usually not. Most bodies minute decisions without attributing views, which encourages people to speak freely and keeps the record short. The exceptions are where somebody asks for their dissent to be recorded, and where the law requires attribution.
Note it against the item. It matters for quorum and it matters for whether somebody took part in a particular decision. The page has a field for who left the room for an item, which is the case that gets asked about most.
When the meeting that follows approves them, which is why the draft should go round quickly while everybody still remembers. A draft circulated within a couple of days gets corrections; one circulated a month later gets silence, which is not the same as agreement.
Yes, and it is the same caution as any record made after the event: write what was decided, not what you now wish had been decided, and be careful with anything you are reconstructing. The date fields make the gap visible, which is the honest way round.