Home

||ScreenShots

||Training

||Project Page

What is YaMA ?

Yet Another Meeting Assistant (YaMA), will help you with the Agenda, Minutes, Invitation and Action Points of a Meeting. If you are the assigned minute taker at any meeting, this tool is for you.

YaMA Features

• Collects information about all aspects of a meeting : agenda, attendees, issues discussed, decisions taken and action points.
• Prepares formatted text that one can simply copy and paste into email and send. Or wiki aware text that you can directly paste into your team wiki.
• Exports Meeting Invitation and Action Points to iCalendar format to interoperate with other calendaring applications.
• Exports Action Points to Wiki markup table format - simply copy and paste into your wiki pages so as to conveniently communicate the actions
• Exports/Imports Action Points to CSV format - use this to backup your Action Points and/or integrate them with other incident management tools.
• Exports/Imports Attendees list to/from CSV format - create and save different attendee lists to reuse for different meetings
• Parses Action Points from text of past Minutes - very useful when reviewing past Action Points to record those that are still open
• Allows you to save and load your options to files so that you can use different settings for different meetings.
• Allows you to assign an hourly cost for each attendee and calculate and communicate the cost of the meeting in the mintues.
• Has a simple, intuitive, interface

Limitations

• Generates only plain text and wiki aware minutes, no html.
• Is stateless, i.e. does not save complete meeting information that is entered to be used next time the program is invoked.
• Does not have the finest of 'look and feel's

Future Enhancements

• Optionally generate minutes in HTML format.

To begin with ...

Before you start using Yet Another Meeting Assistant (YaMA), these are the things you need to know and do.

• YaMA is written in Python (www.python.org), an interpreted language. To know all about what Python is, what is it good for, why one would like to program in it and any other queries you might have, see Introductory Material on Python. You may also want to see this BeginnersGuide.
• You need to install Python (version 2.x)to run YaMA.
  
  If you are running Linux, Python should be pre-installed. However, YaMA uses Tkinter, which may not be installed. If Tkinter isnt installed, you will need to install the same from your distribution CD. The package name should be python-tk .
  
  For more information on Tkinter, you might want to see this Tkinter documentation.
  
  If you are running Windows please see Python Windows FAQ . Also see How to install Tkinter for help on installing Tkinter.
  
  If you are running MacOSX, please see Installing Python 2.3.x and Tkinter on MacOS X .
• YaMA is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; specifically the version 2 of the License
  
  YaMA is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.
• I have a day job. So I have worked on YaMA in whatever extra time I can make available at home.
• YaMA has been tested with Python 2.5.1 on Windows and Python 2.6 on Linux. I cannot test it on other platforms for lack of resources. If you test YaMA on any other version of Python on any other OS, and if you let me know, I will put up a note in this space and give you credit.
  Additionally, YaMA has been tested on
  • python 2.5 and 2.5.2-0ubuntu2 by Shirish Agarwal
  • python 2.7.3 and Windows by Kartik Dasika
  Thanks so much ! :)
• Your comments and suggestions are welcome. I will try my best to acknowledge your email and improve YaMA with your suggestions.

Download

There is only one file to download.

Install

Just create a directory, say "YaMA" on your computer and save the file in that directory. Thats it ! If you are on unix, ensure that YAMA.py has executable permissions. Then change to that directory and ...

Run

run YaMA : ./YAMA.py