ThemeClose & follow up
CardCard 10 of 63
Questions5 to explore
StepClose and follow up

Documentation

Capture what happens in the workshop

Documenting as you go is one of the few things that is genuinely easier online than in a room.

Documentation means capturing what happens during the workshop: the decisions made, the ideas surfaced, the outputs produced, the questions left open. Without it, a session that felt energetic and productive evaporates within days, and participants leave with nothing to act on or build from.

Online the raw materials are already digital. Sticky notes in a Miro board can be exported. A whiteboard is a screenshot. A chat thread is a log. Slides are already a file. The work of documentation is mostly about deciding in advance what you will capture and making sure it happens during the session, not afterwards when memory has faded.

Online, specificallyOnline, everything is already a file, so the question is not how to capture it but whether you have planned who captures what and when, because once the call ends the content is gone if nobody saved it.

In a remote session

The same building block as it plays out online: how experienced facilitators tend to handle it when the room is a screen. Illustrations to react to, not rules to follow.

Assign a note-taker

Good facilitators designate one person whose role during the session is to document, so they are not trying to facilitate and capture at the same time.

Use the tools you already have

They treat the shared document, the Miro board, and the chat log as live documentation artifacts rather than extras, so capturing is built into the session rather than bolted on at the end.

Export before closing

They save and export everything before ending the call: board export, chat download, shared doc link, because the tools close when the meeting ends.

Circulate a summary within 24 hours

They send a short summary to all participants the same day or the next morning while the session is still fresh, including decisions made and next steps.

Questions to plan around

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

Who is responsible for documentation during the session, and have they agreed to that role?
Which tools will produce outputs you can export, and do you know how to export them?
What specifically do you need to capture: ideas, decisions, next steps, or something else?
How and when will you share the documentation with participants after the session?
What will you do with the documentation after you have sent it?

What trips people up online

Planning to document 'afterwards' usually means it does not happen, or happens so late that the detail is gone.
If the shared board or document is messy and hard to navigate, participants will not return to it later even if they intend to.
Chat logs contain things people typed in the heat of the session that may not reflect final decisions, so treat them as raw input rather than an official record.