Why record every meeting? Are you actually going to listen back to it? Waste of time and energy to me.
It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection. Consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials. And it isn't so it wasn't.
Well guys you decided this at the meeting 6 months ago, that's why you aren't getting the feature you just imagined in your dream last week. Guess what, it generally doesn't matter. Stakeholders want what they want, business, customers and requirements evolve. Having "receipts" or thinking that throwing them in peoples face is somehow going to win you arguments is naive.
Hmm I’m probably due for a re-read…
Oh, so we're talking about “recording” as in writing down a record? Not “recording” as in “audio recording” of the meeting. Then I agree with that.
Edit: it looks like bcantrill was actually talking about audio recording [1], and then I'm much more skeptical.
Recording the meeting won't prevent what will be done in engineers' absence, will it? Do you mean that engineers have peace of mind that they could listen to the recording and learn about everything discussed in the meeting?
Having a record allows all kinds of automated followup, post analysis, etc. This level of business intelligence and actual understanding is helpful in improving organisation function and individual training long term.
Asynchronous is _a_ great next step beyond that:
Moving discussions and decisions async has been a massive improvement in the organisations I have helped. Goes against dogma and habit (with all the huge obstacles that come with it) but pays off quickly.
Discussions are more factual and evidence based.
Decisions are thought through and transparent.
Collective (and individual) memory of what has been discussed, decided, and why is much better.
Training people to be clear, succinct, transparent also help them not get bogged down in gut feeling, habit, dogma, ego, posturing, pestering, politics, etc.
And of course the immediate bonus of individually flexible scheduling and not killing efficiency by slicing everything to administration/manager-mode-time.
I believe the idea for the meetings are mostly to plan for something or align the team due to changes in requirements or divergence in execution and as such they should rather discuss limited topic(s). That's why I feel meetings minutes are suffice to reach good consensus
Having access to past meetings is super useful for onboarding. You can get a picture of what everyone is working on super quickly.
Documentation is good, but it only gives you what the author wanted to show you. Recordings give you what they cared about, which questions they've considered and which questions they already see as settled, what problems they need help with, etc.
(But the video format isn't ideal. I'm looking into using Whisper on the meeting archive.)
Having said that, some meetings don't meet these criteria. 1:1 meetings don't for sure, nor do calls centered on conflict resolution.
Recording generally means transcription and the ability to do automatic summarisation and to query action items, which _are_ useful
Also it means folks can be away or if someone didn't quite catch/understand something relevant to them they might want to rewatch some of the meeting.