[Noisebridge-discuss] Meeting Optimization

[Christie Dudley]

Great ideas, Nils!  Although I have reservations on non-members running
meetings, I concur that we should have people with no interest in discussion
topics running the meeting, and it operate on a rotating basis.  We could
pick someone for the next meeting at each meeting to make this go a little
smoother, I think.

I have another point to add that I'm not seeing listed here regarding
consensus items.  With the lack of clarity on what the consensus item was, I
think we could do better here.  Particularly things that are "second week"
on the agenda for a consensus decision, could we have more than a sentence
on "what we are deciding on" in order to make an informed decision?


I saw something else at the meeting last night that has me particularly
concerned:  Social pressure to not block a consensus.  It seemed to me that
it took Reuben quite a bit to overcome people's hesitation to block, and
things dragged out much longer than they should have because people didn't
want to "be the bad guy" and block something that others seemed to feel was
fine.

If we're going to be able to avoid totally seizing up due to lack in
understanding or agreeing on definitions of issues, it's valuable to "be OK
with" the notion of blocking or tabling an issue for offline discussions and
explanations.  Unless it's something that's time-critical and must be
decided right away, making the call "we need to make this issue more clear
before we can have a consensus on it" then taking it offline to clarify
would help everyone tremendously.  This isn't the first time we've had an
issue come up where we aren't sure we're all on the same page as to what it
means, so it seems to me we could do better with that.

Christie

-- 

Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total
obliteration.
 - Bene Gesserit Litany
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/attachments/20090408/91b12ca2/attachment-0003.html>