[wplug-board] This saturday's GUM and board meeting

[Patrick Wagstrom]

On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 13:27 -0500, David Ostroske wrote:
> Patrick, even if we all arrive early, we don't really have authority
> to start early. If we could meet 3 hours early, there's nothing to
> stop us from meeting 3 days earlier, or 3 weeks.

Geeze, what is this, the FCC where no more than two commissioners can be
together at the same location outside of official meetings?  If we need
to get together and talk about something, then we should talk about it.

> But it wouldn't make any difference, because passing a special rule of
> order requires BOTH a 2/3 vote and prior notice (or without notice, a
> majority of the entire membership, which is pretty dang huge)
> (Robert's, 10th ed., p.116). Even if we agree to recommend the
> language, the Membership wouldn't have been given prior notice. So
> we'd have to wait until January, anyway.

My experience with Roberts, which is moderately extensive, is that it's
not meant to be used like a blunt instrument like this.  Even when I've
worked with government at all levels (state, national and int'l), many
things were done by consensus because it's just faster.  If we're going
to nitpick every little thing according to Roberts there are MANY MANY
things that have to go about WPLUG.  Roberts is best used when there is
a controversy - and I'm very glad we have it.  I'm not advocating
ditching it, but for a single meeting the chair can ask if it's okay to
pass around the penguin for folks to talk.  If there are objections, we
revert to Robert's rules.  The point is that Robert's rules are there to
enable organizations to succeed in difficult situations, not hamstring
them over a 3 oz stuffed penguin.

> Well, I got the impression that the Program Committee is simply in
> charge of lining up the events, not announcing them. Unless, though,
> event announcements constitutes reports to the Membership. We'll sort
> this out at the meeting.

Isn't part of lining up an event making sure that people know about it?
If we're expecting the folks from the program committee to really take a
vested interest and put their hearts into this, we can't say something
like "well, sure you can plan them, but all communications need to go
through us so we can slow you down".  Taken from 7.3 of the bylaws:

"""Its duties shall include planning and making arrangements for all
WPLUG events, including presentations, installfests, and tutorials,
except those events assigned to another committee."""

Seems like announcing stuff is making arrangements isn't it?  Unless I'm
missing something.  The less work the board does the better.  If we can
get committees to do it, why not?  It builds up new leaders and
encourages true ownership of the organization.  

> > If hosting is just generally making announcements, making sure folks
> > sign in, and the such, I have no problem hosting.
> 
> There's a list of things to be done by the host and others. It's on the website:
> http://wplug.org/pages/wplug-meeting

In that case probably not.  While I have no problem organizing people at
the meeting, making announcements, etc, I simply don't have time to
recruit all the other people before the meeting.  In the future the
program committee can take this up and try to assign folks well in
advance.

--Patrick