Meetings and communications

What is the relationship between meetings and persistent communications?

The common opinion --let us state it here for the first time-- is that we communicate during meetings, of which we produce minutes. There is a wide-spread reluctance to even produce detailed minutes, on the ground that reading them --even worse commenting them!-- would be a loss of time, and a source of misunderstanding and disorder.
In short: spending time reading and writing in public forums is inefficient and reprehensible...

The alternative supported here is that we should primarily communicate in public, persistent forums, and only have check-point meetings.

Here is why:

• Complexity: we don't understand each other immediately, and we get out of our meetings with a lot of incomprehension. Meetings are well-suited for simple matters. We don't know in advance what will be simple.
• Meetings are passionate and do not lead to quality decisions
• Meetings are synchronous and therefore time-consuming: everybody goes at the pace of the slowest. Everybody must listen to everything which is said, and cannot skip anything.
• Meetings are frustrating: in the name of efficiency, we refrain from discussing matters in depth.
• Because we don't log arguments or rationales, and always stop at a superficial level, we tend to repeat ourselves without making progress.
• Minutes are typically poor quality documents: flat, and thus duplicating information better documented elsewhere. People reading the minutes will not read the actual documentation. This is counter-productive!