Process minutes: 2008-07-09

Agenda:

Process cmtee
7/9/2008

Agenda:

1. Checkins
2. Monkey review
3. Review work for fall season
4. Refreshing Policy Moments
5. Fall event for GO
6. Quorum
7. Next meeting

Minutes:

Wed 7/9/2008
7-8pm, Unit 18

Present: Catherine, Jillian


2. Monkeys/Cooler/Freezer items from previous meetings:

FREEZER: bring this back for a future agenda (see minutes 9/14/05,
social expectations around parties and invitations.)

MONKEY and COOLER: Process to ask minute takers to come to a process
meeting at the start of each work term to talk about the full minute
taker job description, and talk about the using names issue so they
are aware of some of nuances.

COOLER: General discussion about meeting attendance and quorum
needed. And outreach to people - I think this came up around offering
specific invitations to households encouraging them to come. This
might be something process could bring to a community meeting, to
increase awareness - committees should be talking with folks who have
strong opinions about an area or idea, before the meeting, but also
will want them to come to the meeting itself, and a direct invitation
can be very helpful.

COOLER:
- Discussion about how CRC members are chosen, is that working ok?

COOLER: Naming names in committee meeting minutes, reread current
guidelines, make sure they're ok for both committees and plenary

DONE: guidelines about participation when you can't come to a meeting
- Infoco has a draft guideline.

IN-PROGRESS: Another thought for the future - give people credit for
being in a facilitation guild and then that group decides who is
facilitating when - and over a year you may facilitate a lot or not a
lot but you get credit for attending the guild meetings and being at
debriefings... More flexible and would end the problems of someone
being assigned to a meeting with a topic they are vested in. (More
like the old days, of raising hands at the end of a meeting for who
will facilitate the next one!) If this season's assignments turns out
to be hard this may give us incentive to switch over to something
like this... Might be a good followup with Laird's training being
done. Might help keep a cohesive group of folks of all levels of
experience involved in facil, rather than just 8 at a time.

Re-MONKEY: Catherine will buy hooks/attach fishing line for the new posters.

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MONKEYS from the previous meeting, 6/11/2008

Re-MONKEY: CRC should talk about the fact that they can't all to
rotate off at the same time. What are the current CRC members each
thinking about their terms, who is willing to continue? If everyone
wants to continue for a while that's great, its just that when folks
do want to rotate off it needs to be staggered.

DONE: MONKEY: Gail will put stickers on the booklets about involving
teens in organizations and put in the process library.

DONE: MONKEY: Catherine will send out an email to talk about the
booklets about involving teens in organizations.

DONE: MONKEY: Jillian will ask Rod about the Grace Potts evening, see
what kind of feedback he heard about it from GOers.

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MONKEYS from this meeting, 7/9/2008

MONKEY: Hopefully Gail is willing to continue on steering and as
agenda point person? Catherine will ask.

MONKEY: Jillian will check in with Willie about being Book of AGreements tech.

MONKEY: Catherine will check in with Patti about Infoco convenor.

MONKEY: Jillian will send out a heads-up that there will be fewer alt
meeting slots but that we will still need 2 people to lead the two
slots.

MONKEY: Catherine will schedule a CRC meeting.

MONKEY: Catherine will check in with the two groups of folks who said
they'd be willing to work on the kids and the CH issues and bring it
back to the community.

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3. Work for next season

Per the community agreement about regular and alternative meetings:

"B. In October and November, Great Oak will have two Regular
Community meetings to help address widely-held concerns that agenda
items be able to keep moving during the months when we are working
intensely on the budget."

So we will only have 2 alternative meetings in the fall season, and 6
regular meetings.

So that's 2 alt meeting leaders. Seems like we should add another
facilitator - we have 14 slots. And meetings can tend to run long
during budget time. With 7 facilitators that's 2 per - some people
will do two regular meetings, some one regular and one alternative.
The total hours stay the same.

Catherine will check in with CRC members and get back to Process.

Jillian is willing to keep convening.

MONKEY: Hopefully Gail is willing to continue on steering? Hopefully
Gail is willing to continue as agenda point person? Catherine will
ask.

MONKEY: Jillian will check in with Willie about being tech.

MONKEY: Catherine will check in with Patti about Infoco convenor.

MONKEY: Jillian will send out a heads-up that there will be fewer alt
meeting slots but that we will still need 2 people to lead them.

Infoco will check in about work stuff this Sunday at their meeting as well.


4. Refreshing Policy Moments?

We have a number of new members now and plenty of agreements that old
members haven't looked at in a while. What might be useful to review?

One piece Katie had emailed Process a while back was that the minutes
from the 6/3/07 training day with Laird were interesting - that was
the day we spent trying different formats like Open Space, there were
some ideas in there.

The next biz meeting has one large item already, might be full, maybe
we should just think about a relevant agreement to review for August

(or maybe one of the two kids in the CH groups will want to come back
by August, and talk about adding to the common house agreement.)

CRC was working on email issues as well.

MONKEY: Catherine will schedule a CRC meeting.

Pond Use Statement from June 2006 - now that we have the "GO yacht
club" should we pull that out? Its short:

1. Boats should be out of the water and locked up when not in use.
2. Boats should be stored away from the road.
3. PFDs (personal flotation devices) should be available for use when
in a boat.

We should potentially add, where the key(s) is kept, and anything
else that should be added now that we have some experience with
having boats? Idea for a short agenda item. If there is a short time
slot in the July agenda that would be a short one.

From June 2006, "Value Statement around cleaning up our own stuff
from the common house, and communicating with others about it"
That would be a good one.

We can see if there's space on the July agenda. Jillian will be here
for the July meeting but away for August.



5. Fall event for GO

Any further thoughts about a fall event for GO? I don't get a sense
that there's excitement about long range planning and what Grace
Potts suggested we do. We don't have any way to force people to come,
they'd have to be excited about it, they have to want to do this. A
good number of people would be glad we did it but without the upsurge
of interest its hard to imagine it working. Maybe its too general,
the topic needs to be narrowed?

Someone suggested bringing in an outside facilitator to work on the
kids and the CH issues. Maybe we can make progress on that on our
own. Are people scared to deal with it or just busy? It seems to me
that if we could do it at the community level on our own that would
be preferable - its much more draining and scary to deal with the
issue at a "full day event" kind of thing. And people might feel
like, we already spent at least two whole weekend sessions with an
outside facil talking about this.

Maybe we can help encourage these two "kids and the CH" groups to
meet. I think Sarah was the point person for the GO-kids group.
Alicia was the other one. The GO community meeting minutes from May
and June will say who the others in each group were. MONKEY:
Catherine will check in with the two groups of folks who said they'd
be willing to work on the kids and the CH issues and bring it back to
the community.


6. Quorum
We'll see if Infoco wants to talk about quorum at all on Sunday. We
do have an interesting number of households (both owner members and
associate members) that have checked out of community process - that
never come to a regular community meeting, or come extremely rarely.
So we lose out on their ideas and energy when we work on ideas and
proposals and problem solve. And what if one of these households
decides they don't like something - say a proposal has come back to a
meeting several times after being worked on etc - can they then jump
in at the 11th hour if they want to disagree with something even if
they haven't put the work in otherwise? In our current system yes
they could do that. Should process periodically check in with
households, ask them why they don't come? Maybe a friendly and direct
invitation would be helpful? Maybe we'd learn new things about our
meeting times or formats, and just let folks know they are missed.



7. Next meeting
Process meets the 2nd Wednesday of the month, and is very welcome to
the monthly infoco meetings. The next regular Process meeting is Aug
13, Jillian will be away. Gail and Catherine can meet if they wish to
of course. The next infoco meeting is Sunday July 13, 7:30pm at
Sarah's house. The one after that is August 5, 6-8pm at Sarah's - we
each bring our own dinner, from the CH or from our house.

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