Tracking meeting action items

Every board knows the failure mode: a good discussion, a clear decision, and three months later nobody remembers who was supposed to call the paving contractor. Action items are the fix.

Where they live

In the sidebar, open Meetings → Action items. This is the community's running to-do list across all meetings — not buried inside any single meeting's minutes, but one list the whole board can see.

Creating good action items

Action items typically come out of meetings — a decision gets made, and the follow-through becomes an item. The Board Secretary's minutes drafts help here: decisions phrased as "X will do Y by Z" are easy to capture as items. Each action item should have:

• A clear task — "Get three quotes for pool resurfacing", not "pool stuff".
• An owner — one person. Items assigned to "the board" belong to no one.
• A due date — even a rough one. Dates are what make the list reviewable.

Working the list

The list shows each item's status, so at any moment the board can see what's open, what's done, and what's stuck. The habit that makes this work is simple: review open action items at the start of every meeting. It takes five minutes, it's the natural first agenda section (the Board Secretary includes open items when drafting agendas for exactly this reason), and it creates the gentle accountability volunteer boards otherwise lack.

Mark items complete as they finish — a list where done things linger stops being trusted. If an item stalls meeting after meeting, that's information too: either it needs a different owner, a smaller scope, or an honest decision to drop it.

Why this belongs in the platform

Keeping action items next to meetings, minutes, and documents means the trail is complete: the minutes show a decision, the action item shows the follow-through, and the audit history shows when it closed. When a resident asks "whatever happened with the drainage issue from the spring meeting?", the answer is a lookup, not an archaeology project. Volunteer boards turn over — the list is how the next board inherits the last board's promises instead of losing them.