Hello all! I am a newish DT3 user taking on my first big project, and would appreciate the input of this dedicated community to guide me on my Journey. I have decades of meeting minutes and probably over 5000 motions made that I would love to isolate from the minutes and classify for further synthesis to tell different stories about the organization based on its actions. I have a plan and a question or two as follows:
Note: I think I prefer the group/replicant model of classification because of the nesting structure and the fact that I just like the folder idiom.
So far, my minutes files are grouped by year and have the meeting date as a prefix to the filename. What I intend to do is open each set of minutes, copy & paste each motion into a separate MD file and save it into a group of all individual motions named to reference the source file and date. Now for each individual motion, I can replicate it into whichever topical folders I find useful (i.e. expenditures, rules nominations, constitutional changes, etc.). Once done, I hope to have a rich source of related organizational actions that can be used, for example, to easily update the constitution with reference to the meeting wherein the change was approved, review approved expenditures when auditing the books, or compile the latest version of the rules.
First question: Am I reinventing the wheel or otherwise taking on an unnecessary amount of work to accomplish some of the goals listed above? The main reason I feel the need to atomize the motions is that it cannot always be determined from a search which topics are appropriate until I read it, and I want to be sure I’ve looked them all over. It may be that annotations or some other kind of note tied to the document may serve the same purpose, but I haven’t thoroughly explored these options and worry (probably unnecessarily) about preserving the option of exporting my work from the DT3 environment should the need arise.
Does a script exist that can automate the process of copying the selected text and pasting it into a new MD file named to reference the source document and saved in the predetermined group? I’m happy to dive into any scripting tutorials that might exist if I can expect to get something working in a few hours. Otherwise, I should just bite the bullet and start the grunt work.
I’ve read enough of the forums to know that I shouldn’t agonize over my process too much and just get to work using DT3 to see how it goes. I plan on getting back to this within the week and not spend more than another half-day setting myself up to leverage the available technology, but I do think it’s worth a forum post to make sure I didn’t miss something obvious.
Thanks,
S.