The general assembly, from notice to signed minutes

The evening is three people working at once

A general assembly is not a board meeting. One person is at the door ticking members in, another is writing the minutes, a third is running the room and opening ballots. With one spreadsheet and one paper list that means somebody is always waiting for somebody, and the roll gets corrected in the margin when a member arrives late.

So each of the three has their own screen, on the same meeting and with the same numbers. The door screen can sit on a tablet at the entrance, the minutes are written somewhere else, and the hall's screen shows what is being voted on. Each writes in its own place, so none of them overwrites the others' work.

The notice keeps the deadlines in your statutes

The notice is written in the system with the agenda as its content, published on the association's own page and sent to the members. Along the way the screen checks it against your own statutes: is the notice period met, is the deadline for proposals stated, are the accounts attached where the statutes require it.

This is not a formality. An assembly called too late, or without what the statutes require attached, can be declared invalid afterwards, and that is usually discovered only when somebody needs to rely on the decision.

At the door: the roll, the proxies and the latecomers

The roll is not an attendance list but an electoral register: who may vote, who turned up, and how many votes each person carries into the room. A proxy is recorded against the member who stayed home, naming whoever carries it, so the cap your statutes put on proxies can be counted rather than estimated.

The door screen stays open all evening. If somebody arrives during item three, that is one search and one tap, and the screen then shows who arrived after the start and when. That number changes while voting is going on, and the chair has to be able to see it without asking.

Ballots, and who can actually vote

Proposals are written under the agenda item they belong to, with the majority your statutes require. A ballot can be open or secret: on a secret one there is no path back from the vote to the person, not even in the database, and the count is in votes rather than in people, so a proxy weighs what it should.

The hall's screen shows what is being voted on, together with a short address and a code members can copy down or have read out. The code is not a password: the member logs in as themselves, and only somebody checked in at the door can vote. In return the chair can see how many of the people in the room have logged in and can vote from their phone before opening the ballot. The rest vote on paper, and that is on the roll, so the tellers know how tall the stack should be.

The minutes are signed, and the members can read them

Afterwards the minutes are written item by item, with the ballot results counted from the votes rather than typed in. The screen splits the work into steps, so what belongs to the preparation is not still in the way the evening after the meeting.

A general assembly's minutes are not signed by the board but by the chair of the meeting, and by the minute taker where the association appointed one. Both are ordinary members, so they are asked on their own page, the same one they voted from. Once the signatures are in, the minutes can be published on the association's public page alongside the notice and the attachments.