Sealed meeting minutes, drafted from the recording

In short. Every team or community meeting carries its minutes. Once recorded for good, they are sealed: nobody can change them, and it is known who sealed them and when. The draft writes itself from the recording of the session: transcribed on your server, summarised by the local engine, with the verbatim kept underneath. The recording then leaves for the archive and off the server.

Minutes are only worth something if you can be sure they have not moved. In teams as in communities, every meeting therefore carries its minutes — and once recorded for good, they are SEALED: no longer editable by anyone, with a trace of who sealed them and when. Before sealing, the draft can be reworked freely.

The draft that writes itself

The system first assembles a FACTUAL draft: participants, agenda, decisions entered during the session. Then, as soon as a recording of the session is available, it completes it in two steps:

• the transcript is made ON your server (local Whisper engine): the recording is sent to no outside service;
• the local engine writes the summary — decisions taken, points discussed — and places it at the head of the minutes. The full transcript stays underneath, and it is the transcript that is authoritative.

The summary carries, in plain words, a note saying it was written by the machine and must be reviewed. That is deliberate: a language model gets things wrong, and sealing remains a human act, named and final.

The box you can untick

Every meeting carries a “the session will be recorded” box, ticked by default. The team lead or the community facilitator unticks it whenever they see fit, before the session. An unticked session refuses the recording — including one a machine would try to deposit. Recording people means telling them: the box is not a decoration.

The recording does not stay on your server

An hour of session weighs around 30 MB in audio and 400 MB in video; the minutes and their transcript, a few dozen kilobytes. The server therefore does not keep recordings: they pass through it. Once the minutes are written, the file leaves for the destination chosen by the person in charge — a folder on another disk, a Nextcloud or WebDAV space — and the local copy is deleted.

An original is never deleted without proof of arrival: the file placed at the destination is read back before the local copy disappears. If the destination does not answer, the recording stays, and the archiving screen says so.

What remains in the minutes weighs nothing: the file name, its size, its SHA-256 fingerprint and the address of the archive. Enough to find the original two years later — and to prove it is the right one.

Without depositing anything by hand

The deposit can be manual — the file is dropped onto the meeting record — or automatic: whatever recorded the session sends the file to the system with the room name, and the minutes are written without anyone touching them.

See also: Self-hosted video conferencing for knowledge transfer · The modules of the knowledge ERP · Security and data confinement · Backups and recovery after an incident · Validated lessons-learned (REX) software