Confidential Agenda Items

Confidential agenda items let you exclude specific people from an item in a meeting, including people with full administrative access. Use them to manage conflicts of interest, publicly excluded business and any other information that needs to stay with a smaller group.

When to Use Confidential Items

• Conflicts of interest: exclude a board member, staff member or admin who has declared a conflict of interest on an item, so they cannot see its papers, discussion or minutes
• Publicly excluded business: keep publicly excluded (in committee) items out of the agenda, minutes and meeting pack you distribute to the public, such as for school boards and councils that meet in public
• In camera sessions: run part of a meeting without certain attendees, such as a board-only session without management present
• Sensitive matters: restrict items about staff performance, remuneration, legal advice, complaints or commercially sensitive information to the people who need to see them

Videos

• Making Agenda Items Confidential
• Minute Taking and Confidential Items

Making Agenda Items Confidential

What's Covered

Admins can otherwise see everything in the portal. With confidentiality, a member or admin with a conflict of interest stays out of one item and still takes part in the rest of the meeting.

Who Can Manage Confidentiality

Only the creator of the meeting or the chairperson of the meeting can make items confidential. Other admins do not see the option.

People cannot exclude themselves. If the meeting creator needs to be excluded from an item, the chairperson sets it up. If the chairperson or anyone else needs to be excluded, the creator can do it.

Excluding Someone from an Item

1. Open the meeting and click Edit Agenda
2. Click the Manage Confidentiality (lock) icon on the agenda item
3. Tick Make Confidential
4. Choose the people to exclude
5. Click Save

To include someone again, open the same option, remove them and save.

Top-Level Items Only

You can only make top-level agenda items confidential. The confidentiality option is not available on sub-items. When you make a top-level item confidential, it flows down to all of that item's sub-items, so the excluded people cannot see any of them. To keep a sub-item confidential, place it under a confidential top-level item.

What Excluded People See

Once excluded, a person cannot see into the item or its sub-items anywhere in the meeting:

• Meeting details: the item and its attachments are hidden
• Agenda: the generated agenda shows the item as Confidential
• Minutes: the generated minutes show the item as Confidential, while the rest of the minutes appear as normal
• Meeting pack: the item's attachments are left out of the pack generated for them
• Meeting folder: they can open the meeting's attachments folder but cannot see or access the confidential item's files

Uploading Confidential Attachments

To keep an attachment confidential, add it to the item with Upload External File. A file uploaded this way exists only on that agenda item and takes its permissions from the item, so excluded people cannot see it.

A file added with Choose Internal File keeps the permissions it already has in Documents. Anyone who can see that file in Documents can still see it, even if they are excluded from the agenda item.

Hiding Confidential Items in Generated Documents

When generating a PDF version of the agenda, minutes or meeting pack, or a zip download of the meeting, the meeting creator or chairperson can tick Hide Confidential Items. The generated document leaves out every confidential item and its attachments, so you can distribute it generally.

For example, organisations that hold meetings in public (such as New Zealand school boards with publicly excluded business) can generate the agenda, minutes and meeting pack with Hide Confidential Items ticked for public distribution, then untick it to generate the full versions for internal use.

Minute Taking and Confidential Items

What's Covered

This video shows what happens when the minute taker is excluded from a confidential item.

An excluded minute taker can still take minutes for every other part of the meeting. For the confidential item and its sub-items:

• The minute fields are disabled and no existing minutes are shown
• Nothing can be saved against the item
• Clicking Next in the minute taker moves past the confidential items to the next item they can access

Someone who has access to the item needs to record its minutes. They can take the minutes live, or add notes taken outside the system afterwards.

Plan Ahead

If your usual minute taker has a conflict on an item, arrange in advance who will record the minutes for that item.

If you have any questions about confidential agenda items, reach out to support@ourcatherder.com