Lean Coffee Discussion Notes

Template Overview

Lean Coffee meetings maximize conversational engagement by abandoning rigid top-down agendas in favor of participant-driven voting and strict timeboxing. This template organizes topic ideation, democratic vote tallies, timebox extensions, and consensus action items into structured Markdown.

Markdown Template Structure

Copy the block below or click Download .md File to add this template directly to your personal vault:

---
title: "Lean Coffee Discussion: [Session Topic / Group]"
date: [YYYY-MM-DD]
facilitator: "[[Facilitator Name]]"
participants: ["[[Alex]]", "[[Maya]]", "[[Julian]]", "[[Devin]]"]
meeting_format: "Lean Coffee (Democratic Timeboxed Agenda)"
tags: [lean-coffee, agile, discussion, collaboration]
---

# Lean Coffee Discussion — [Session Topic / Group]

## 1. Topic Board & Vote Tallies
| Topic Proposal | Proposer | Votes | Discussion Order |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Local-First vs Cloud Collaboration** | [[Alex]] | 8 Votes | 1st (Discussed) |
| **Optimizing Apple Silicon Whisper Models** | [[Devin]] | 6 Votes | 2nd (Discussed) |
| **Reducing Markdown Template Duplication** | [[Maya]] | 5 Votes | 3rd (Discussed) |
| **Cross-Platform Future Roadmap** | [[Julian]] | 2 Votes | Backlog (Not Reached) |

## 2. Timeboxed Topic Discussions
### Topic 1: Local-First vs Cloud Collaboration
- **Initial 5-Minute Timebox:** Discussed customer concerns regarding cloud data retention.
- **Roman Voting (Extension):** 4 thumbs up (extend 3 mins), 0 thumbs down.
- **Consensus Takeaway:** Reaffirmed our core thesis: users want zero-cloud local storage for sensitive notes. We will never introduce cloud sync that compromises local file ownership.

### Topic 2: Optimizing Apple Silicon Whisper Models
- **Initial 5-Minute Timebox:** Reviewed Whisper Turbo memory footprint on 8GB and 16GB Macs.
- **Roman Voting (Extension):** 3 thumbs up, 1 thumb down.
- **Consensus Takeaway:** Implement automatic memory checks that recommend the Base model on 8GB machines to prevent swap thrashing.

## 3. Action Items & Owners
- [ ] [[Devin]] Add automated RAM detection heuristics to the model download panel.
- [ ] [[Alex]] Author architectural guide explaining local-first file sovereignty.

Filled Real-World Example

Here is a realistic example demonstrating how this template captures actual deliberations:

---
title: "Lean Coffee: Engineering Architecture"
date: 2026-10-06
facilitator: "[[Rachel Adams]]"
tags: [lean-coffee, engineering]
---

# Lean Coffee: Engineering Architecture

## 1. Top Voted Topic
The team democratically selected the topic 'Should we support custom CSS themes in Markdown preview?' with 7 votes.

## 2. Outcome
Agreed that supporting standard CSS design tokens preserves WCAG accessibility while giving power users flexibility.

When to Use and When to Avoid

When to Use

• Use during weekly engineering open houses, cross-functional discussions, or community forums.
• Use when meeting participants desire an egalitarian, agenda-free conversation.
• Use to enforce healthy meeting timeboxing and prevent conversational monopolization.

When to Avoid

• Avoid using for formal board meetings or legal compliance audits.
• Avoid using for urgent incident triage requiring top-down executive command.

On-Device AI Integration

Summarize your recording in Oyma with this local instruction:

Analyze the Lean Coffee discussion audio recording:
1. List all topics debated and their approximate discussion timeboxes.
2. Summarize key consensus points and philosophical agreements reached for each topic.
3. Extract committed action items and assign them to participating team members in clean Markdown.

Your data remains securely on your Mac with zero cloud exposure.