Re: Board meeting procedure

I am in favor of this proposal and would certainly not shed any tears if
the entire IRC meeting practice withered away and died. I find email to
be easier to understand, more self documenting and far more secure than
IRC. Therefore, I say yes.

On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 14:53, Ian Jackson wrote:
> After last board meeting, I said that I think we should change the
> usual procedure at board meetings to avoid them turning into argument
> fests.
>
> No-one followed up to my email, so I assume people didn't think it
> unreasonable, but this last meeting turned into another collosal waste
> of time and IRC argument.
>
> So, since just stating my opinion hasn't worked, I'm going to propose
> a formal resolution, which I'll ask Wichert to put (as the first
> item!) on the agenda of the next meeting. A draft is below.
>
> Please comment on them now so that we can have a nice argument.
>
> My goals are:
>
> - to save the Secretary from having to write up enormous IRC logs into
> coherent minutes
>
> - to get our routine meetings down to 15-20 minutes
>
> - to improve the quality of our decisionmaking by allowing wider,
> easier, and better discussion
>
> - to improve the accessibility of our decisionmaking by moving the
> bulk of it to email.
>
>
> A. WHEREAS
>
> 1. It is important that board meetings, which require simultaneous
> presence of a quorum of the board, be short.
>
> 2. IRC discussions provide less easily read archives of discussions
> than email archives, and require substantial efforts at redaction
> to produce minutes.
>
> 3. IRC discussions are less accessible to people who are not available
> at the time of the meeting than email.
>
> 4. IRC discussions are more prone to misunderstandings, accidental
> offence, and personality clashes, than email.
>
> 5. On-line board meetings via IRC are a poor medium for
> discussion for the reasons given above.
>
> B. IT IS RESOLVED THAT
>
> 6. Discussion at on-line real-time Board meetings of Software in the
> Public Interest shall be limited to the absolute minimum necessary,
> by the specific measures below, and by the active cooperation of
> the Board and others during meeting.
>
> 7. No items shall appear on the agenda of a Board meeting that are
> not accompanied by a firm proposal (or alternative versions, if
> there's a disagreement) in ready-to-vote resolution form. There
> ought to have been at least a week or so for discussion by email.
>
> 8. Reports of any kind shall be posted in advance to the board list. They
> should be accompanied by a standard form resolution like `the board
> thanks so-and-so, and accepts the report'.
>
> 9. There shall be strictly no discussion during the meeting. Anything
> that requires more discussion than has taken place before the
> meeting shall be postponed until next meeting or email voting. If
> board members feel the discussion has not been adequate then they
> should vote NO on the relevant motion.
>
> 10. The meeting chair shall be ruthless in enforcing the rules above.
>
> 11. The above rules may be deviated from in case of necessity, such as
> external deadlines, emergencies etc.
>
> C. IT IS FURTHER RESOLVED THAT
>
> 12. The practice of waiting for guests to state their name during the
> meeting will cease. Instead, the Secretary shall start logging the
> channel 15 minutes before the meeting, and guests will be asked to
> state their name during that period, or when they arrive if they
> arrive later.
>
> D. IT IS FURTHER RESOLVED THAT
>
> 13. The information about the availability of board members for the
> next meeting will be collected by email in advance of the meeting
> by a volunteer member of the Board, who will correlate the
> information and propose a date for approval by the meeting.

--
_____________________________________________________________________
Ean Schuessler ean(at)brainfood(dot)com
Brainfood, Inc. http://www.brainfood.com