Roundtable notes template

A roundtable produces views rather than decisions, so the write-up has to be organised by what the room kept returning to, not by the order things were said. That is a document rather than a deck: theme blocks vary in length, some carry three quotes and some carry one, and the pages have to break wherever they land. The reader should be able to see the shape of the discussion in a couple of minutes.

Code the quotes to themes before you generate

The work that makes a good write-up happens in the data, not in the layout. Tag each quote to a theme and give each theme a one-line claim, and the document more or less assembles itself: a block per theme, its quotes nested beneath it, participants and follow-ups looping from their own rows. Doing it this way also makes a series comparable — run six sessions on the same question and you can count how often a theme appeared across cities, which is impossible when every write-up is prose in a fresh file. The usual failure is quotes that never got attributed to anything, leaving a document that reads like a transcript.