Below are some wisdom passed down to me from on high, with regards to 
formatting of minutes.  

	-Tim Abbott

Timothy G Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU> writes:

> Any comments on the style of minutes would be appreciated, since
> this is likely similar to what you'll see from me in the future.

Since you're asking... :-)  It'd be nice to see the minutes styles be
a little more consistent, they've been wandering around in the past
couple of months.  When I did this, approximately anything that wasn't
the template or people speaking went into square brackets.  For
example:

MIT Computing Report:
        jhawk: Several printers in the W20 cluster caught fire today.
                We wound up extinguishing a half-dozen users.  The
                problem was traced to a bug in the printers'
                PostScript rasterizers.  [reads 3-DOWN message]

Computer Services:
        jhawk: During the printer outage 3-DOWN was overloaded.  Move
                to allocate $1000 for a PC to replicate the 3-DOWN
                service.

        [much confused discussion ensues]
        [motion fails 1-6-2]

There was also a convention for annotating allocations specifically, 
so that the treasurer could grep the minutes for them.  This seems to 
have lived on a year or two after people started noting other things 
other ways, but it was [$USER allocation: $AMOUNT for $THING].  So:

Office Report:
        deberg: We're out of CD-ROMs.

        keithw: We used to have a standing allocation for office
                supplies that could cover this.  Don't we still?

        astronut: At least a dozen people showed up in the office
                yesterday trying to back up their Athena accounts.  I
                don't understand why.

        jhawk: If Ops gave users direct access to backups, then we
                wouldn't have this problem.

        [jbarnold physically restrains cfox]

        arolfe: Move to allocate $100 for CD-ROMs.

        [white ballot]
        [arolfe allocation: $100 for CD-ROMs]

Other notes:

-- The username is always indented by 8 columns, the remainder of the
   text at 16.  It looks like you've done this.

-- Text is wrapped at 72(ish) columns.

-- Always insert a blank line between speakers.

-- There was at least an occasional convention of inserting "nil" for
   reports that were mentioned but nothing was said, e.g.

Other:
        '()

-- The minutes don't need to include every word that was said.

-- It's okay to blow off jhawk and other mold that complains at you
   about trivial things like your minutes formatting.