Adding Attendees

After building out the general components of a meeting, next click the Attendees tab.

You will automatically be added to the Current Meeting Attendees section. Add additional attendees by selecting them from the Remembered Attendees section and pressing the include button (down arrow in between the sections). Or manually add in individual attendees by pressing the + (plus) button and filling out the fields for email address, first name and last name.

Important Note: The first time you run Summit, you will not have any Remembered Attendees. Instead of adding attendees one-by-one via the + (plus) button, quickly and easily add people in bulk via the Meeting Organizer for use across all your meetings.

As you select each attendee within the Current Meeting Attendees section, you can assign them a Meeting Role and a Team. You can also press the Edit (pencil) button to edit the attendee to update their email address, first name or last name. Pressing the - (minus) button will remove the attendee from the meeting and return them to the Remembered Attendees section.

As you select each attendee within the Current Meeting Attendees section, you can assign them a meeting role. These roles are an important component to having an effective meeting as no single person will be able to simultaneously succeed by holding all roles. You don't have to use all the roles for every meeting and within the definitions below you'll see those that generally are required for an effective meeting denoted with Recommended.

As such, you should plan on assigning roles to an individual attendee and as you have future meetings with the same or similar attendees, rotating the roles so that no one ends up continuously holding a role from meeting to meeting.* Along these lines, you should also rotate assignments between those with roles and those without so that no single person or group of individuals always need to take on additional duties within the meeting.

* The exception to this rule might be the role assigned to an administrative assistant. As an example, they might always be the scribe across all your meetings.

Here's a breakdown of each meeting role, its traditional meaning and anything unique about it...

Facilitator (Required): This is the person who is running the meeting. Think of this role as the conductor, leader or navigator of the meeting. You set the direction for where the meeting goes, when to progress to the next agenda item and work to ensure all attendees are involved and active participants. By default, Summit will make you the facilitator although you can assign this role to someone else if you're not going to be present at the meeting. If you're an administrative assistant who is setting up a meeting for someone else, simply make the requestor the facilitator. unless if someone else has been specified.

Scribe (Recommended): This is the person who will be recording the meeting minutes or notes. Ideally this would be assigned to someone else other than the facilitator, although it's not uncommon for the facilitator to perform this role as well.

For the most effective meetings, it's best to assign this role to someone other than the facilitator, but this does then require some coordination of getting the notes from the scribe to the facilitator for inclusion within the meeting minutes.

Alternatively, if the facilitator is good at multi-tasking, they can run the meeting and take the notes themselves as the meeting progresses. Summit is fully setup for this mode of operation and includes ease-of-use and automation to make taking notes as low bandwidth as possible.

Important Note: If you have the scribe role assigned within a meeting, Summit will automatically call this out when the meeting begins within the meeting notes as a reminder. Otherwise if you as the facilitator will be taking the notes, don't assign this role to anyone else and it will be implied by Summit that the facilitator will be the note taker.

Referee (Recommended): The meeting referee is the person who helps to make sure the meeting stays on track. It's not uncommon for meeting topics or discussions to change gears and divert to something other than the current agenda item. The referee should continuously make a mental note as to whether the discussion is relevant and if not, call this out in the meeting to move the discussion back to the scheduled topic at hand.

You might be wondering how to handle a topic that doesn't relate to the current agenda item, but
is still an important topic to hold. During the meeting, use the Bin List to capture these topics. If the
agenda items end early and there's still time left in the meeting, you can return to the Bin List items
for discussion. Or the facilitator can turn these binned items into agenda topics in a future meeting.

If the discussion is relevant to the meeting but the timing is off, call that out. For instance, you
might be discussing a topic too soon and before its time on the agenda. Ask everyone to hold off on their thoughts until you hit that agenda item. Or maybe the discussion is rehashing a prior agenda item. The facilitator should make the call to return to that agenda item for further discussion or to politely acknowledge the discussion but note that that agenda item has already been discussed and the meeting needs to move on.

Observer: The meeting observer is someone who is attending the meeting to simply listen in and provide no input or discussion. If you're working under Agile or Scrum methodologies, you might have various people attend a meeting as an observer such as stakeholders, clients or product owners to a Sprint Review. Or under a more general meeting, you might have a person from a sister organization attend to gather information for their own team or a manager attend to assess the team dynamics.

Decision Maker: The decision maker is a single person or multiple people who will decide upon an important question, direction the team should take, etc. Sometimes the people in the role simply have authority to make these decisions and other times they also have a monetary budget or access to resources, people, assets, locations, etc. to help the meeting or the team.

Sometimes you will have a decision maker always present in the meeting if there are numerous and regular decisions to be held. Other times you may want to strategically invite a decision maker to a particular meeting instance if you know there's a decision you'll need their input on.

Outsider: The outsider role is similar to the observer role except that they do provide input and discussion within the meeting. This can be someone outside of a project's regular attendees, such as human resources, legal, finance, etc., or maybe someone working on a parallel project. In some organizations, this might be a dotted-line assignment to the meeting.

Tech Host: In larger meetings, it might be beneficial to have someone other than the facilitator manage the technical aspects of the meeting including the online meeting software, physical phones in the conference room, in room cameras, etc. By assigning someone to the tech host role, they take on all of the technical aspects of the meeting thereby freeing up the facilitator to manage and facilitate the meeting without being encumbered by any technology hiccups.

Chat Moderator: If you have an online meeting, there's a high likelihood that there will be a chat function within the software. Similar to the tech host role, assigning someone to be the online chat moderator, frees up cycles from the facilitator so that they can better focus on running the meeting.

Next, within the Attendees tab and after selecting an attendee, you can assign them to a team.

Teams can be useful if you're working under Agile or Scrum methodologies where people are grouped by teams. Alternatively, teams can also be used to assign people to functional teams or departments. Along this train of thought, you could use the team assignment for engineering, sales, validation, management, etc.

At this stage of creating the meeting, the team assignment isn't used, but can be extremely helpful in later stages for agenda items, decisions and action items where you might assign an item to a team instead of a person.

PRO Only: If you're using the PRO version of Summit, whether fully registered or within the 30-day trial, you can take advantage of all that the team feature offers. Why not have Summit PRO match your workplace environment where you often assign action items or make presentations as a team rather than an individual.

Important Note: The first time you run Summit, you will not have any teams listed. You can create and assign attendees to teams via the New team... option within the Team popup menu. Alternatively you can manage your teams from the Meeting Organizer for use across all your meetings.