[wplug-board] Todays meeting: the good, the bad, and the ugly

[Bill Moran]

Patrick Wagstrom <pwagstro at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> Good Stuff:
> Hey, we had a meeting!  This is good.  We created a PR committee.
> People got to see what was being done.  I think there was some real
> excitement.
> 
> I think that the body of WPLUG was pretty happy with what we've been
> doing.

Agreed.

> Bad Stuff:
> People are not so big on the whole hand raising thing.  A lot of the
> issues that people were bringing up in the meeting should just be
> addressed to committee and not needed in the meeting.  Is this a problem
> with getting the word out to other folks about how to communicate?
> Maybe we should have an open time sometime in the meeting.  Anyway,
> reports generally are NOT the time for new ideas.

I was considering how to control that, but it generally didn't get too
out of control.  It was (for the most part) the same people who have always
had difficulty determining the best time/place for certain topics.  As
I commented earlier, I think we're going to have to address folks on an
individual basis.

Another way this could be handled is to visibly not recognize speakers
who do not officially take the floor.  I'm willing to be the meeting
Nazi if that's what we need to do, but I didn't do it yesterday because
it seemed to me that things were flowing well in spite of.

Perhaps this should go on the agenda for the next board meeting, to choose
an "attitude" to take when running membership meetings.  I'm willing to
do my best to enforce whatever is agreed apon.

> Reports for committees and officers - we should look at having these
> written down so we don't need to skip back between people.   It makes
> the meeting flow better.  If we could also project the meeting agenda on
> the projector that would be awesome.  Let's people know what's coming
> up.

Those are good ideas.

> Make sure we have a copy of the minutes available for the next meeting.
> Paper works too.  

Yes.  Oops.  I think we, as a whole, rely on Dave _too_ much.  He's normally
so well organized, that if something comes up and he can't make it, we're
all standing around with our pants around our ankles.

> We need to resolve the issue of who counts toward quorum.  I would
> suggest that new people NOT count toward quorum.  Reason: if someone
> really wanted to screw with WPLUG, they could show up with a few friends
> who were members  and a bunch of hired guns they paid $5 to let become
> members.  They could do it in one meeting that we would otherwise not
> have quorum.  This way it takes them two meetings.

This may require an amendment of the bylaws.
I can find nowhere that it states who is counted toward quorum.  As a result,
we fall back on Roberts, which (as best as I can tell) does not specify
anything more than saying "members".
Since the requirement for becomming a member is paying dues and providing
contact information, we pretty much have to consider anyone who has done
so a member.  In some ways it's unfortunate that this is so easy to
acoomplish.

Personally, Patrick, I expect that you, as Treasurer, will be the impetus
for this to change.  I expect that over the next few months we'll learn
that raising the yearly dues is justifiable.  While I don't expect it to
go too high, I think it would be good if it were high enough that folks
actually took a minute to consider it before joining.  Even if it were
just $5/year and didn't count toward pizza, for example.  I'm just
speculating right now, however.

> In the future we (the board) should probably all sit together or
> something.  It creates a uniform presentation and says we mean business.

I was going to request that when we started, but you seemed pretty settled-
in where you were, and I deemed it not important enough to slow things down.

> The Ugly:
> We started WAY too late.  We need to make it to these things on time.
> If you thought it was hard getting 15 people there for quorum at 10:30,
> wait until next time when they think "They started at 11:15 last
> time...".  In these cases it is rarely the best thing to set an end
> point for the meeting because that automatically de-prioritizes stuff
> further down on the agenda just because it was further down.  This
> really annoyed me today.

Agreed.  Although we seem to disagree on the best way to handle it.

I was fully prepared to start on time and record in the minutes that no
votes could be taken because quorum was not accomplished.

I long ago learned that the best way to convince people to arrive on time
is to start on time no matter what.  We could have chosen a temp secretary
and forged on.

(Note that the good news here is that we _did_ finish the meeting in the
time originally alloted - if we had started on time, we would have finished
on time.)

Note also that I tried to fall back on my "keep to the schedule no matter
what and people will eventually catch on" plan by ending the meeting at the
scheduled time.  I didn't think it would be good form to discuss different
theories of operation in the middle of the meeting, though, so I capitulated.

I go back to "this should be on the next board meeting agenda".  I'll do my
best to enforce whatever we decide on, but I feel the board needs to come
to a consensus prior to taking any "hard lines".  I don't think we need to
make any "offical proclomations" or anything, just discuss it and come to
a consensus so we all know where we stand.

I do agree, very wholeheartedly, that we set a terrible precident by
waiting for everyone, then moving the meeting back to accommodate people
who could not or would not arrive on time.  It had a negative impact on
the rest of the day.  I believe that we will need to be very deliberate
to "untrain" the behaviour that we enfoced yesterday.  I don't have an
exact plan for this "untraining" at this time, but I think making it known
that we won't be doing that again, in an official capacity, is part of
the equation.

Note:  I just looked it up, and if we were to strictly adhere to Roberts,
this is what would have happened:
1) Meeting would have started promptly on time.
2) We would have immediately noticed that we did not have quorum.
3) We would have recessed "to take measures to obtain a quorum"
4) Once we had enough people, we would have reconvened and forged on.
(RONR: p 336)

> Getting enough members to show up was painful.  In the future we should
> be calling people at 10am, not at 10:45am.  While that sort of stuff
> used to work in college for student government meetings, very few people
> live 10 minutes away from CMU.

Agreed.  People should arrive at least a few minutes ahead of time.  As a
"theory", perhaps we should make it a policy that if we don't have quorum
ten minutes before meeting start, we request that members already in
attendance start calling any member they know to remind them.  Hopefully,
this will result in us achieving quorum at some point in the meeting.
The meeting starts and stops _on_time_ regardless of whether or not the
phone calls work.

This is not an ideal solution.  My theory is that it may save the current
meeting.  Hopefully it will (long term) train members that we are going to
start on time no matter what, and that they should make a sincere effort
to get to the meeting on time.

Again, we need to discuss this and come to a consensus.

> Lots of stuff to talk about on April 12.  Great work everyone, I think
> we showed that WPLUG is growing to be a vital, member driven
> organization.  I'm stoked.

I as well.

As a side note, we have a bit of a social experiment under way, and I want
to point out something I thought about while things were happening yesterday:
Notice how different levels of responsibility can be seen.  There are a
number of people made sure they arrived on time.  A single meeting is
not an all-inclusive demonstration of exactly who will be a reliable
participant (since circumstances come up in eveyone's life that can
affect their ability to seem reliable)  But, over time, we'll see those
who, fairly consistenly, show up on time.  If WPLUG is a steam engine,
these are the firemen, who ensure there is always enough coal to keep the
train moving.  Remeber their names and faces :)

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com