Rule 14 of 33 · Chapter III — Meetings We Actually Keep
Someone owns the notes and the next steps
Why this rule exists
A meeting with no record is a meeting you'll have to hold again, because memory diverges the moment everyone walks out, and within a week two people will sincerely remember opposite conclusions. Assigning someone to capture the decisions and the action items, who's doing what by when, is what converts an hour of talking into something that actually moves the work. Notes also serve the people who weren't there, which is the whole point of making meetings optional; the notes are the deal that lets someone skip guilt-free. Without a clear owner, note-taking falls to whoever feels most anxious about it, or to nobody, and the meeting's output evaporates. The discipline of naming action items with owners and dates is also what stops a meeting from being a place where things are 'discussed' forever without anyone being on the hook to do them. Talk is cheap; a named owner with a date is the thing that ships.
In practice
At the start, or by rotation, decide who's capturing notes for this meeting. Keep the notes light: the decisions made, the action items with an owner and a due date each, and any open questions. Post them somewhere the team, including absentees, can find them, and link them from the relevant project. Read the action items back out loud before ending, so nobody leaves with a different idea of what they signed up for. Follow up on those items in the normal flow of work, not in another meeting. If a meeting produces no decisions and no action items, say so honestly, it's a sign the meeting probably didn't need to happen.
When it doesn't apply
Purely social gatherings and casual one-on-ones don't need formal notes, though even a one-on-one benefits from jotting down anything you agreed to do. And a five-minute impromptu huddle can get by with a one-line summary dropped in the channel afterward.