How to manage condo meeting notes in the Web 2.0 age?
I'm secretary of my condo association again. Last time, I set up a blog on blogspot, but the last secretary didn't keep it up. Besides, there were a number of requirements and concerns from the residents including:
- Privacy - the whole world doesn't need to know about our pigeon problem and how we're dealing with it
- Persistence - our meeting notes are scattered through several e-mail accounts. We need a permanent place for them, organized in a single spot.
- Transferable - when I leave the job, there shouldn't be questions about where the meeting notes are and how to maintain them
- Distributed responsibility - people should be able to add to and to update the information as needed
- Simplicity - we needed a tool that wasn't much harder to use than MS Word. Everyone has e-mail and Internet access, but overall this isn't a very technical group.
- Price - free is good. No one wanted to buy a permanent domain for the association and host it.
- Access - not everyone has a gmail account, so I'm not 100% that everyone can get into it. So far so good, but I still have a little doubt.
- Persistence - Google hasn't made any promise that this service will be available for the long term. We may need to move the information at some future date.
- Expansion - members already want to expand beyond meeting notes to include contractor information, contact lists, etc. A wiki would be a better tool for this, but I'm worried about the technical capability of my neighbors.

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