Currently, I am the Recording Secretary for my fraternity, so I decided to write a script to look through the minutes I've been writing and find some trends. This script determines how many times someone speaks and makes a motion during a meeting, as well as the lengths of various sections within the meeting and the meeting overall.
For the crawler to work, it acts under the following assumptions:
- There is a well-defined roster of all members in a file called roster.txt.
- The minutes files to inspect are in a directory called minutes.
- When someone speaks, it is recorded in the format "NAME:".
- When someone makes a motion, it is recorded in the format "NAME: MOTION (seconded and passed)".
- The meeting contains the sections Committee Business, Unfinished Business, New Business, Special Orders, and Announcements.
- The start time of the meeting is declared as "Called to order at TIME".
- The end of the meeting is declared as "Adjournment (TIME)".
These are a lot of formatting specifics, but when the file is in the correct format, you will get interesting statistics from a meeting!