Tracking Meeting Attendance within a field in a Jira Project tracking Users as Work Items

[Ellen Gruebbeling]

Hello Atlassian Community, 

I hope that this message finds you all well! I am reaching out to see if any teams have previously tracked attendance within Jira for individual team members and/or if there are any recommendations for a configuration that would allow for this tracking.

Our team has a project where we tracked individuals as work types/issues. Statuses represent if they are active/inactive and tracks their contact information, functional areas, etc. However, we would also like to track meeting attendance for each individual, so that attendees across one meeting can be assessed as well as an individual's overall meeting attendance. 

For example, if we have Users A, B, C, D, and E. And there are meetings 1-5, we would want to be able to pull a filter that would show all users (team member B attended Meeting 1, 4, and 5) attendance for all five meetings, as well as for each individual meeting (for example for Meeting 2, users C, D, and A were in attendance). 

Initially, our thought was to create a new custom field for each meeting, added to a "Meeting" tab on the user/team member issue type/work type. Each custom field would include the date of the meeting to differentiate the fields from other meetings, likely using a single select field with Yes and No options. This configuration will allow for filtering options (based on the single drop) that aligns with the team's tracking of alternative metrics. However, the concern with this approach is that it will result in multiple custom fields specific to this configuration that are specific and cannot be repurposed for other projects. We have considered alternative options, such as radio buttons, multiple select, and/or checkboxes, however, these options make parsing out specific responses more challenging (the team would prefer a way in a filter to see each meeting as its own entity). Open text and paragraph fields have similar limitations. 

Are there any recommendations on how this tracking in Jira could be approached? Please let me know if you have any questions or if additional information is needed. We appreciate any feedback or recommendations. Thank you!