using org for meeting agendas and minutes?

[Adam Spiers <orgmode@adamspiers.org>]

I "accidentally" became secretary of my resident's association
committee recently, so I'm now producing meeting agendas and minutes
more often than before (sometimes it happens at work too).  So I
thought I'd poll the enormous collective wisdom of this group and see
if we could establish some kind of best practice around using org for
this task.  It could even become a Worg article ;-)

These are the goals as I see them:

  (1) Allow *fast* production of meeting agendas and minutes,
      exportable in a good-looking legible format which non-org
      readers can digest.

  (2) Allow minutes to be taken as the meeting progresses, minimising
      the amount of work required after the meeting.

  (3) Allow actions to be captured and then automatically extracted
      into a simple tabulated report which clearly shows actions
      grouped by owner.

  (4) Track progress of actions *after* the minutes have been issued.

  (5) (Up for debate) Allow minutes to be embedded within a previous
      agenda, easily demarcating between agenda items and minute
      items.  This encourages the meeting to follow its intended
      structure, and clearly documents unplanned deviations from the
      agenda (for better or worse), e.g. via colour coding.

I think it's pretty obvious that org already enables (1) and (2)
admirably, and of course I'm already beginning to use it in this
manner.  But I'm slightly struggling with the others.

For (3) and (4), my current thinking is to have workflow defined by
TODO keywords, e.g. 

  #+SEQ_TODO: ACTION WAITING | DONE

and to have action ownership defined via tags, e.g.

  #+TAGS: { Alice(a) Bob(b) Carys(c) }

Then a dynamic columnview block at the end of the file could easily
extract all actions and summarise them so that each owner of action(s)
can easily see them.  This is where sorting of rows in column view
would be really useful!

For (5) I'm really not sure how to achieve the demarcation.  Maybe
it's best when beginning to take minutes simply to copy the agenda to
a new file and start embedding minutes within that.  Then a diff of
agenda.org and minutes.org shows any deviations etc.?  This would also
preserve the original agenda by protecting it against accidental
editing.

Any thoughts on this or other ideas very welcome!

Thanks,
Adam