![Minutes: Process 2008-11-11 [Minutes]](display/images/gocohologo.gif)
Process minutes: 2008-11-11
Agenda:
Process Cmtee meeting11/11/2008
7-8pm, CH sitting room
Agenda
1. Checkins
2. Monkey review
3. Status of Book of Agreements programming
4. Quorum discussion at next community meeting
5. Trainings GO has done
6. Next meeting
Minutes:
Present: Gail, Catherine, Jillian, Willie2. Monkeys/Cooler/Freezer items from previous meetings:
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:
Discussion about how CRC members are chosen, is that working ok?
COOLER: Naming names in committee meeting minutes, periodically reread
current guidelines, make sure they're ok for both committees and plenary
Ongoing 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.
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MONKEYS from the previous meeting, 10/14/2008
DONE: Jillian will lay out our vision statement in Indesign and provide to
Catherine.
Re-MONKEY (?): Catherine will put out an email about Member Resources to
talk about the library: if anyone has come across a book or game that the
think would be of use to GOers and good to have in the Community library to
let process know, could be related to all kinds of topics (gardening,
cooking, energy, etc) not just process.
DONE: Jillian will check in with Grounds about a date for their planning
day, and also make sure they know that the full amount of money is available
to them, $1700.
Re-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.
DONE: Gail will count attendance at meetings 2005-2008.
DONE: Jillian will check if quorum is in the bylaws.
DONE: Gail will put a quorum discussion in the queue, start with a 20 minute
discussion, reflections on how quorum is working for GO.
DONE: Jillian will make a list of what trainings we have done.
DONE: Gail will add the "value of training" discussion to agenda queue for
another 20-30 minute discussion. its not about the 2009 budget.
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MONKEYS from this meeting, 11/11/2008
MONKEY: Willie will send out a note to "talk" letting people know about the
cool new functions, and also will ask if people have any requests for
changes/development.
MONKEY: Jillian will check in with current BOA enterer about printing out
the agreements to put in the printer binder of BOA.
MONKEY: Jilian will check in with membership cmtee to see if the printout of
BOA agreements that's in the sitting room is still useful. It will never be
as up to date at the electronic version.
MONKEY: Gail will email renters to make sure they know, that they are
encouraged to participate fully in meetings, that their voice counts as much
as anyone else's, there are very few decisions they cna't be part of. (This
should be spelled out in the levels of membership agreement.)
ONGOING MONKEY: when there are new people send them an invite to come to
meetings.
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3. Book of Agreements update from Willie
Willie is mostly done with the advanced search - he finished it last night.
Some bugs to be worked out. Pretty cool! You can search within committees,
within only agreements, within only minutes, etc.
Discussion about what he should work on next - he's done his summer and fall
hours, so will put in another chunk in the spring.
One item, is incorporating PDFs - options both for getting the text of PDFs
as searchable, and for including PDFs as graphics in case there are
charts/graphs/drawings.
Idea - add dates into "surpassed by" message so you can tell when original
was and when new one. Also the surpassed agreement itself should say
"surpassed" on it.
Willie also added a public listing of most important agreements, and added a
guest account for Sunward and Touchstone so they could look at the entire
BOA if they wanted.
When someone copies and pastes from MS word into BOA we get all these funny
characters - Willie has put in routines to strip them out, but sometimes
the funny characters mean things - like double quotes and em-dashes. Not
sure what we can do about that. (I use a text editor, BBEdit to strip out
special characters but most folks don't have that.)
Features around surpassed agreements - show the difference of what changed
from old to new? Is it worth it to do that? Maybe if it doesn't take a lot
of time.
Category about agreements and when they've been refreshed/reminded at a
community meeting, not that the agreement has been changed but when the
whole gorup reviewed the agreement. Would be useful for process cmtee
especially, not a huge priority but handy.
Would also be useful for process cmtee to be emailed when an agreemnet is
added or altered.
MONKEY: Willie will send out a note to "talk" letting people know about the
cool new functions, and also will ask if people have any requests for
changes/development.
MONKEY: Jillian will check in with current BOA enterer about printing out
the agreements to put in the printer binder of BOA.
MONKEY: Jilian will check in with membership cmtee to see if the printout of
BOA agreements that's in the sitting room is still useful. It will never be
as up to date at the electronic version.
4. Quorum
Gail pulled up the quorum document we use now. "Quorum is reached when a
simple majority, 1/2 plus 1, of households are present at a meeting. Once
quorum is reached it is in effect for the remainder of the meeting, even if
household leaves. July 23, 2001."
The bylaws used the term, 51% of units. (not households.)
Gail did data gathering from minutes. Doesn't show anything radical, but we
have been in the teens for number of households more often in 2007 and 2008
than we were before that time. The data does not show when we had to go out
and knock on doors to get quorum, it just shows the totals of course.
Is the current definition of quorum still meeting our needs?
Which path do we want to go down - looking at changing quorum, or, looking
at how can we increase meeting attendance?
Maybe we should start out at Monday's meeting with the question, Why do we
set a quorum? So people can think about the purpose behind it, and that will
probably lead to comments about how consensus works too.
Re the idea of changing quorum:
I think we want to have a majority, dropping to less than that seems scary
to me. Even though it can be hard to get that majority.
Do we need to have more clarity about who counts? Tammy, Mel, Sarah, and
Eric - if all four of them are at a meeting, how many households is that?
Three? When Mel moves, are they still three households? How many households
is Joel/Susan/Robert/Mandy? Maybe we just need to clarify that the community
agreement should also be "units" not "households"?
Should we adjust the quorum number needed for our couple of households who
have totally opted out of meetings?
That's a scary thing to acknowledge though - a slippery slope - if they can
do it, I will too, etc, and coming to meetings and being a part of the
consensus discussions and decisions is a foundational thing of what makes us
different from your standard condo association, where a small group makes
decisions and then everyone else complains about them and may not implement
them etc...
Process could recommend as a course of action that first we try
re-energizing, finding out how people want to be notified about meetings,
what would help them come. Then, a year from now, we could look at it
again, and see if we need to change quorum itself.
Ideas around problem-solving, how to get people to come:
- facilitators to email out agenda at least 48 hours ahead
- put paper agendas in everyone cubby 48 hours ahead
- maybe write DECISION ITEM at the top of the agenda, if there is one?
I think that people should come no matter what though - and I don't like the
idea of folks who skipped the discussions, then just coming to the decision
meeting - the whole idea of the consensus process of discussing an item over
several meetings is blown and people who have come to all the discussion
meetings get very frustrated.
MONKEY: Gail will email renters to make sure they know, that they are
encouraged to participate fully in meetings, taht their voice counts as much
as anyone else's, there are very few decsions they cna't be part of. This
would be spelled out in the levels of membership agreement.
ONGOING MONKEY: when there are new people send them an invite to come to
meetings.
5. Training
Idea that came out of the last budget discussion (and was a reminder from
the 2008 budget discussion) is to have a GO discussion about training and
its value, how much do people value it and of what kind of training.
We didn't have time to talk about it tonite, but below is what Jillian
researched about what trainings we've had at GO;
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GO Trainings
>From a 2002 email in the process cmtee about training:
The Process Committee hopes to organize training weekends for the community
every year -- ambitiously, we're thinking of one "big" weekend and one
"smaller" one.
The purposes are at least threefold: 1) to help community members learn
how better to be better participants in meetings (e.g. learning about the
consensus decision-making process, about facilitating meetings, etc.); 2) to
help community members gain skills to make our community healthier and
stronger (e.g. conflict resolution training); and 3) to help us all get to
know each other better.
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Fall 1996, some GOers attended a consensus and facilitation training by
Shari Laystrom and David Lillie for Suwnardians.
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12/3/2001
Vision work with Shari Leach (not really a training, more of a working to
finalize the vision event)
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9/28/2002 training by Beatrice Briggs about how consensus process works,
and what is facilitation. (Sunward invited to attend as well. Took place in
the Sunward common house.)
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May 16-18, 2003
Shari Leach, Wonderland Hill Coho Development Company, May 16-18, 2003,
community building weekend
Purpose:
Dedicating ourselves to the ongoing process of developing trust,
understanding, and cohesiveness to make our community life joyful and help
us work through dissonance.
Content: Friday thought Sunday, held at Church of the Incarnation. Saturday
as a community building day, and include elements such as: community
building exercises, conflict resolution, leadership in community, privacy,
gossip. Sunday an optional skills day (group
process/consensus/mediation/facilitation) for those interested in learning
more. The cost of the workshop leader is $1000/day plus travel, food,
lodging, materials, and childcare which gives us a rough total of $3000
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October 16, 2004
Morning: overview of the consensus process, by Elph and Jillian
Afternoon: Turning to One Another: Communication workshop presented by
Sandra Greenstone
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(Note, from 2005-2007 a number of GOers were enrolled in Laird Schaub's
2-year facilitation training - it was a three-day commitment every 3 months
for 2 years.)
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Nov 11, 2006
Diana Kardia: all day training on Understanding our Differences
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Nov 10, 2007
Diana Kardia and Karen Williams: all day training, When Does Difference
Matter?
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1/27/2008
2 hour training by Annie Zirkel, "Don't Take the Bait", an Anti-Bullying
training for children and their grownups.
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5/7/2008
Grace Potts
2 hour info session (not really a training) about strategic planning
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6. Next Process meeting
Supposed to be the 2nd Tuesday in December, but Jillian can't make it that
night, so we've tentatively changed in to that Monday, 12/8, 7pm, CH sitting
room if its available.
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