The OSBR Handbook

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Meeting Recording ​

This standard governs how OSBR records and transcribes meetings: only with prior consent from everyone present, and only for the purpose everyone agreed to. A decision made in a meeting and remembered only in people's heads gets misremembered, disputed, or silently reversed; "I think we agreed to…" is not good enough six months on. Done right, the recording becomes a searchable decision record — usually produced with the help of AI transcription (see the AI Usage Guideline) — that the client and the team both trust. It is bound by the consent and retention discipline of the Data Protection Policy, and the records it produces link back into the Development Guide's tickets and pull requests. Requirement levels follow RFC 2119: MUST / MUST NOT are absolute, SHOULD states a strong default overridable only with a documented reason, MAY marks a free choice.

Recording is where our values meet a hard boundary. Be Nice: nobody has to reconstruct a meeting from memory, and the client can always retrieve the exact record of what was decided and why. Be Kind: we never record someone who did not agree to it — consent comes first, every time, with no exception dressed up as convenience. Be Strong: we build the shared record deliberately, before a dispute needs it, so that under scrutiny the truth is already written down and attributable.

1. Goal ​

The goal is to preserve the decision-making process, not just the conclusion, as a single shared source of truth. The transcript is the record of what was said; the decisions and action items extracted from it are the record of what was agreed. When the transcript, a ticket, and someone's memory disagree, the decision record is the one that governs.

This exists to serve, not to surveil. A recording captures a conversation people chose to have on the record, and the data is used only within the scope the client agreed to.

2. Responsibility ​

  • The meeting owner (OSBR side) MUST obtain and confirm prior consent from every participant before recording starts, state the purpose and scope, and stop recording if anyone declines.
  • Project / Engineering runs the transcription pipeline, stores transcripts and summaries in the access-controlled knowledge base, and enforces retention and deletion — including confirming the tooling's own data handling matches the agreed scope.
  • Data protection honours access, correction, and deletion requests over recordings and transcripts, retains only for the agreed period, and confirms the consent model and any vendor's data-processing terms are acceptable for the applicable jurisdiction (per the Data Protection Policy).
  • Every participant — client or OSBR — MAY decline to be recorded or ask that a portion be off the record. That request is honoured without penalty.

3. Practices ​

3-1. Prior consent is a precondition, not a formality ​

Recording MUST NOT begin until every participant has given prior, informed consent. This is both a legal requirement and a trust requirement.

  • The meeting owner MUST announce, before recording starts, that the meeting will be recorded and transcribed, why (to preserve decisions as a shared record), and who will have access. Recording begins only after agreement.
  • Consent MUST be prior and affirmative — an announced "I'm starting the recording now, any objections?" with a real pause, not a recording that silently began before anyone was asked. Silence after a genuine, clearly-heard request MAY count as consent only where everyone could realistically object; when in doubt, ask each person explicitly.
  • The consent itself SHOULD be captured as a record — the opening seconds of the recording where consent is given, or a written agreement.
  • Any participant MUST be able to decline or ask that a segment be off the record, and that MUST be honoured immediately, with no penalty.

Why "prior" and "all-party" matter legally. Many jurisdictions require all-party (two-party) consent to record a conversation, and the strictest applicable law governs a multi-jurisdiction call. As a Malaysian company, OSBR starts with Malaysia's Personal Data Protection Act 2010 (PDPA): a recording of an identifiable person is personal data, so the PDPA's Notice and Choice principle applies — give notice and obtain consent before recording, and use it only for the stated purpose. Japan's APPI likewise treats a recording of an identifiable person as personal information whose acquisition and use must stay within a stated purpose (利用目的); the EU GDPR requires consent that is specific, informed, and unambiguous. The safe, universal rule that satisfies all of these: get everyone's consent, in advance, on the record.

3-2. Use only within the client-agreed scope ​

The recording and everything derived from it MUST be used only for the purpose the client agreed to — preserving the decision record for that engagement.

  • The transcript, summary, and audio MUST NOT be repurposed — not for training models outside the agreed scope, not for marketing, not for sharing with other clients or teams — without fresh, specific consent. This is purpose limitation under Malaysia's PDPA, Japan's APPI, and the GDPR.
  • Access MUST be limited to the people who need it for the engagement, under the access controls of the Data Protection Policy.
  • Where the transcription tool is a third party, its data-processing terms MUST be verified before client data flows through it — where the audio and text are stored, whether the vendor trains its models on content, and how deletion is honoured (see the AI Usage Guideline). A tool that trains on client audio by default is not acceptable for scoped client data without explicit client agreement.
  • Retention MUST be bounded: transcripts and recordings are kept only for the agreed period and then deleted. Deletion MUST propagate to the vendor, not just OSBR's copy.

3-3. Capture decisions as data, not just prose ​

A wall of transcript text is searchable but not yet useful. Each meeting record SHOULD distil the raw transcript into structured decisions and action items — a decision as a first-class record with attributes, not a paragraph someone has to re-read.

  • Each summary SHOULD extract, at minimum: the decisions made, the options considered and rejected (the reasoning, not only the outcome), action items with owners, and open questions deferred to later.
  • Each decision SHOULD be attributable and dated, so the record answers not just what was decided but when, by whom, and why the alternatives were set aside.
  • The structured summary is what makes the record a genuine single source of truth: the transcript is the evidence; the decision log is the answer.

3-4. Make the record searchable and single-source ​

The transcripts and summaries MUST be stored in a searchable knowledge base so the record is retrievable, not merely archived.

  • The record MUST be full-text searchable across meetings, so "what did we decide about authentication?" returns the relevant moment across every meeting, not a folder of dated audio files nobody opens.
  • Each record SHOULD be cross-linked to the artefacts it drove — the tickets, pull requests, and design docs of the Development Guide — so a decision and its implementation are traceable in both directions.
  • There MUST be one canonical store for meeting decisions per engagement. Scattering the same decision across email, chat, and three people's notes recreates exactly the ambiguity this policy exists to remove.

3-5. Shared with the client, not held over them ​

The record is shared — it belongs to the relationship, not to OSBR alone.

  • The client SHOULD receive the summary (and, on request, the transcript) of meetings they took part in. It is a mutual reference, not OSBR's private evidence file.
  • Corrections MUST be possible: if a participant says the transcript misheard or misattributed something, the correction is recorded (appended, not silently overwritten), so the record stays honest and the original remains auditable.

4. Minimum record — checklist ​

A meeting recording is legitimate only if all of the following hold:

  • [ ] Prior consent obtained from every participant, before recording began
  • [ ] Purpose and access stated to participants up front
  • [ ] Consent itself captured (recorded statement or written agreement)
  • [ ] Vendor data-processing terms verified acceptable for client data (storage, training, deletion)
  • [ ] Transcript + structured summary (decisions, rejected options, action items, owners) produced
  • [ ] Stored in the access-controlled, searchable knowledge base as the single source of truth
  • [ ] Used only within the client-agreed scope; retention bounded and deletion propagated

If prior consent cannot be shown, there is no recording — full stop.

References ​

Consent law

  • All-party (two-party) consent — many jurisdictions require every party to a conversation to consent before it may be recorded; the strictest applicable law governs a multi-jurisdiction call.
  • PDPA (Personal Data Protection Act 2010) — Malaysia's data-protection law (amended 2024; regulator: Personal Data Protection Commissioner, https://www.pdp.gov.my/). A recording of an identifiable person is personal data, so the Notice and Choice principle requires notice and consent before recording, the Retention principle limits keeping it beyond need, and use stays bound to the stated purpose — a consent-based regime.
  • APPI (個人情報の保護に関する法律) — Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information: a recording of an identifiable person is personal information, and its acquisition and use must stay within a stated purpose (利用目的).
  • GDPR — Regulation (EU) 2016/679 — Art. 4(11) & Recital 32 (consent must be specific, informed, unambiguous, by clear affirmative act); Art. 5(1)(b) (purpose limitation); Art. 6 (lawful basis).

Practice

  • Decision log / "decisions as data" — recording each decision as a discrete, queryable record with its context, alternatives, and consequences (a lightweight cousin of the Architecture Decision Record).
  • Searchable knowledge base / single source of truth — one canonical, full-text-searchable store governs each engagement's decisions, so scattered notes never compete with the record.

Related OSBR standards