Workshop Planning
Documentation & Recording card, MethodKit for Workshop Planning
Card 13 of 60 · MethodKit for Workshop Planning
  • ThemeMaterials & tools
  • CardCard 13 of 60
  • Questions5 to explore
  • StepGather your materials
Materials & tools

Documentation & Recording

How are you documenting?

Documentation is a design choice, not a task you hand to whoever is not speaking.

How you document a workshop shapes what the group gets out of it. Good documentation captures decisions, insights, and the texture of what was said, not just a list of what was on the slides. Poor documentation loses the work the group did and leaves participants feeling that the effort did not go anywhere.

Decide before the session what needs to be captured, who captures it, and what format it will be in. Photographs of Post-it clusters, written notes from group discussions, a completed canvas, a video recording of a presentation: each captures something different. A phone camera photo of a wall is often the single most useful document a workshop produces.

Recording (audio or video) changes how people speak. If you are considering it, tell people before the session starts and make the opt-out obvious. In many contexts, recording is not needed and a good written summary serves better.

Easy to missAssign the documentation role explicitly before the session, since it never spontaneously happens well if you wait until things are underway.

How experienced facilitators handle it

The same building block, handled by people who have run a lot of workshops. Patterns and illustrations to react to, not rules to follow.

Photo at the end of every activity

Experienced facilitators make photographing outputs a built-in step at the close of each activity, not something they try to remember afterward.

One live note-taker per plenary

For plenary discussions, they assign one person to capture the key points in real time, rather than reconstructing from memory after the session.

Templates that capture structure

They often document into a light template (a table with the activity name, what came out, and the key decisions) so synthesis later is easier.

Questions to plan around

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

  1. What outputs from this workshop need to exist after the session: photos, notes, a synthesis document, a recorded video?

  2. Who is responsible for documentation and do they know that before the session starts?

  3. Are you recording audio or video, and have you told participants and given them an opt-out?

  4. How will you capture small-group outputs that you cannot be at simultaneously?

  5. What format will the documentation take, and who needs to receive it and by when?

Watch for

  • Relying on memory to reconstruct what happened in a full-day workshop is not a documentation strategy: the good material fades within hours.
  • Photographing outputs without labeling which activity they belong to produces a folder of images that nobody can make sense of a week later.
  • Recording permission is easy to assume and hard to undo: if you are planning to record, get explicit agreement before the session, not during it.