Minutes Before the Meeting

Minutes Before the Meeting explores predictive governance through a deliberately modest administrative technology: software that writes committee minutes in advance.

The system is trained on years of agendas, papers, attendance records and previous decisions. When it predicts a vote with sufficient confidence, discussion is marked “procedurally redundant”. Members retain the right to disagree with the predicted decision, although doing so generates additional workload.

The paper reports workshops using fictional pre-written minutes. Participants initially treat the system as absurd, then identify numerous decisions in their own institutions that they believe it could predict. The resulting question is less whether meetings can be automated than what meetings are for when their outcomes are already known.