Appendix: Minutes

It is good practice after every meeting with your advisor or every meeting in which you discuss your FYP progress and planning to record minutes. If one person takes notes during the meeting and then types up minutes immediately after each meeting, it is not a difficult task. If you are a one-person team, then you can alternately type up weekly or monthly work summary reports.

Why type up minutes?

They help you identify what you have you have accomplished or what progress you've made.
They help you set and/or clarify short-term project goals.
They help you go back later and recall when and why you took steps you did; if it's not written down, it might be forgotten.
They can help you write other parts of your FYP.
They can help you become a better communicator.
They clearly document decisions and thus can help avoid arguments later on among group members.
They show your professor that you have been working hard and not procrastinating.
(The FYPs with the most minutes tend to also be the ones that the professors like the most.)
They help you develop a habit that you will probably find useful later in your career.

Examples of Minutes

6. Appendix A - Minutes

6.1 Minutes of the 1st Project Meeting

Date:	July 9, 2008
Time:	11:00 AM
Place:	1/F Café
Present:	Stanley, Andrew, Cindy
Absent:	None
Recorder:	Stanley

1. Approval of minutes
This was the first formal group meeting, so there were no minutes to approve.

2. Report on progress
    2.1. All team members have read the research papers which were downloaded from the Microsoft website.
    2.2. Stanley and Andrew have compiled the whole group’s knowledge about our project and MCL.
    2.3. Cindy has read some books for programming in C/C++.
    2.4. Stanley has tried to install the Mesh Connectivity Layer (MCL) on a notebook,
           but errors occurred when he executed it.

3. Discussion items
    3.1. Issues were raised after Andrew and Stanley discussed the development of the project.
           - We decided to request the academic resource toolkit.
    3.2. We discussed the algorithm of MCL
           - Calculation and operation of the Shortest Path Algorithm, Expected Transmission Count (ETX)
              and Weighted Cumulative Expected Transmission Time (WCETT)
           - Highlighted some useful information from the printed research papers.
           - Learned and understood the elements affecting the best path selection
             (e.g. transmission loss, delay, bandwidth, etc.)

4. Goals for the coming week
    4.1 Stanley and Andrew will read all relevant MCL research papers and decide which information
          is useful for our FYP.
    4.2 Cindy will read books for coding a GUI interface to plot graphs uStanley the C/C++ language.
    4.3 Stanley will try to solve the problem with the MCL installed on a notebook
    4.4 Stanley will send an email to request the academic resource toolkit.
    4.5 Andrew will design a format for our weekly report.

5. Meeting adjournment and next meeting
The meeting was adjourned at 12:15 PM.
The date and time of the next meeting will be set later by e-mail.

6.2 Minutes of the 2nd Project Meeting

Date:	July 23, 2008
Time:	11:00 AM
Place:	1/F Café
Present:	Stanley, Andrew, Cindy
Absent:	None
Recorder:	Stanley

1. Approval of minutes
The minutes of the last meeting were approved without amendment.

2. Report on progress
    2.1 Andrew has received and installed the MCL toolkit on his notebook.
    2.2 Stanley received the toolkit during the meeting.
    2.3 Cindy has searched for some sample code for editing the GUI interface uStanley C/C++.

3. Discussion items
    3.1 We discussed the deployment of our ad hoc network viewer.
          - Andrew and Stanley discussed the language for deploying the MCL as C++,
             because the MCL toolkit uses Visual Studio.
          - Stanley discussed the problem he had when executing the MCL on his notebook.

4. Goals for the coming week
    4.1 All group members try to understand the source code in the MCL toolkit.
    4.2 Andrew and Stanley build up a meshed network and install the MCL software on their notebooks.
    4.3 Design a good schedule for deployment.

5. Meeting adjournment and next meeting
The meeting was adjourned at 11:48 AM.
The next meeting is scheduled on August 13, 2008 at 1:00 PM in the 1/F Café.

6.3 Minutes of the 3rd Project Meeting

Date:	August 13, 2008
Time:	1:00 PM
Place:	1/F Café
Present:	Stanley, Andrew, Cindy
Absent:	None
Recorder:	Stanley

1. Approval of minutes
The minutes of the last meeting were approved without amendment.

2. Report on progress
    2.1 Connected 2 notebooks together uStanley MCL.
    2.2 Tested file sharing and found that a game could work through the connection.
    2.3 Solved the previous problem of operation errors.

3. Discussion items
    3.1 We discussed the data of the MCL connection.
          - Analyze the information gathered from the commands “mcl va” and “mcl lc”
          - We need to confirm that most of the connection and link negotiation messages
             are inside “mcl_lc” which is used to store link cache.

4. Goals for the coming week
    4.1. Try to observe the MCL behavior in a multi-hop environment.
    4.2. Understand and test network recovery of LSQR.
    4.3. Prepare information for the FYP proposal and set an appointment with our communication tutor.