When does a meeting become a "past meeting"?

Hello Steve;

I think that a meeting becomes a past meeting at midnight after the last meeting. That will give members time to update their current agendas after their meeting.

lgtm wrote: It would help us comment if you list out everything that "past meeting" affects.

This is a good point. Let me list everything I can think of... 1st 3 are your points (thx):

1. it affects which agenda shows up by default when you go to the Meeting Agendas page (you are correct)
2. it affects when the "Reconciled" checkbox becomes available (correct again)
3. it affects when the agenda becomes locked for changes by members excluding VPE/Admin
4. it affects how role tallies are calculated, since those include a past / future role count
5. it affects whether or not role signup buttons are displayed.
6. it affects whether or not role confirmation controls are displayed
7. it affects which "past" roles are shown in role reports
8. it affects which "future" roles are shown in role signup sheets
9. it affects how role change notifications are done, since those are only done for future meetings (not "past")
10. it affects how attendance is completed ... e.g whether the attendance drop down is shown on the signup screen and what the "master attendance" record looks like.
11. it affects what meetings are shown in the agenda selection drop-down. (used for navigation)

(there may be more...)

Maybe we *do* use more than one criteria for what a "past meeting" is. I just prefer consistency, whenever possible.

This is likely an impractical suggestion and overly complicates configuration, but did you consider making it a setup option? "When do you want your meetings to become 'past'? Midnight on the day of / at ending time / at start time. I obviously have no idea how the code looks but if it's just one or two variables holding date/time for when meeting is considered ended ...

As for our club, it's fine as it is but if it changes, then end-of-meeting would likely work well for us.

Thanks for asking and for all you do!

Jim Kloss
Delaware County, Pennsylvania Toastmasters #3204
3204.toastmastersclubs.org

I'm not sure how you would obtain "end of meeting" time except by examining the last agenda item and the time tag associated with it. I know from experience that last agenda item time tag is frequently not the same as the actual end of meeting (for many reasons, both "good" and "bad").

Using "start of meeting" would, as several posters noted, would prevent dynamic agenda changes by those clubs that directly access the FTH online agenda during their meetings. We don't want to mess up virtual clubs and such.

Using "midnight" of the meeting day is effectively the same as the current "next day" logic, except for night owl individuals. For the rest of us, we're long asleep by the time midnight rolls around.

How about estimating "time at which meeting is PAST" as "start time" plus a delta? All clubs, with which I'm familiar, meet for 1-2 hours. Are there any clubs that routinely meet for 3 hours? 4 hours? longer? I suspect that a delta of 4 hours would be more than sufficient. And I suspect that a delta of 2 hours would work for the vast majority of clubs and be inaccurate for only a handful, if any.

Hey... here's a thought... Maybe the delta could be a configurable quantity, initially defaulted to, say, 6 hours, but each club could change the delta to reflect their club's normal meeting duration???

Sue Worden DTM
Club 311 et.al.

I am a brand new officer but seem to be the only member digging into online tools and management. My opinion is that a "Past meeting" should have an "end time" at the END of the Meeting.

Hey, everyone, thanks for the input.

Just a note: I do not need any help doing the calculation, per se. I can determine the meeting start time, I can determine the meeting end time, and all the related calculations. I can do the coding... I got that handled.

My question is actually simpler... I am just interested in people's opinion about what point in time we should be using as the point where we say the meeting is now "in the past". Historically, we have said that a meeting is in the past if it occurred on the prior day. However, this means that some activities related to a meeting cannot currently be completed until the following day, such as marking an agenda as reconciled. Also this, affects all the activities I mention above, as well.

The other possibilities that I see are that we could say a "past meeting" is a meeting whose start time is in the past OR we could say that a "past meeting" is one whose end time is in the past. Doing the time calcs would be more involved than a simple date calc, but hey, I can do the calcs... That is why I am doing the code development.