Process minutes: 2004-03-23

Minutes:

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Process cmtee meeting
Tuesday, 3/23/2004, 7pm, Jim Sweeton's house

Present: Amy H, Sarah, Gail, Jim Sweeton, Jillian

Agenda
1. Check-ins
2. Monkeys
3. Review of Work Assignments
4. Minutes and Book of Agreements
5. Mini Process Teaching Moments
6. Fall Process Training Events
7. Conflict Resolution Check in
8. LiLacc Check In
9. Next meeting


2. Monkeys

Amy H did ask Nick and JD again about Touchstone (TS) plans coming to a GO meeting, at that time TS plans were not ready. And JD was hesitant to speak for TS. Maybe we should ask TS directly?
MONKEY: Gail will bring this to LiLaCc meeting, next one is at Sunward. (4/15?)

TS meetings are on Mondays and now on Saturdays, so perhaps once a month they could meet in the GO common house - that would be great, we'd get to meet more TSers, get familiar with eachother. How could would they proceed? The common house usage agreement that we have should cover it, they will just need a GO sponsor.

MONKEY: Sarah is going to keep working on her research on committees.

3. Review of Work Assignments
Process cmtee convenor - Sarah
Contingency hours - Gail
archivist - Gail
Book of agreements - Willie
Agenda planning and posting - Melisa
faciltiation - [[Rod]], Jim G, Mary King, Jillian
meeting setup - Rachel
meeting restore - Mary King
minute takers - Lisa, Willie
agreements tracker - Tammy
timekeepers - Eric, Helen

Question about facilitation, widening the scope of who facilitates. Discussion about having each person only facilitate once in the three month period, would pretty much be the same as volunteers from the floor except you'd get some credit still, 12 people.

It does add a scheduling layer though - those people will need to get together and figure out who's available when.

Should we experiment to see if people will do it without work credit? Or we could put up a sheet of paper with all the dates for the next three months, and get volunteers for them, and then work that into the work system? That might be neat to do - still gives credit, and opens it wide for everyone to take part.

Jillian handed out a first draft of a facilitation job description. Seems important that people read that and keep it in mind when they volunteer to facilitate. don't want to make is seem scary but also do need people to grok all the aspects of it.

Do the rest of these jobs have job descriptions? Don't know - those who are doing the jobs should be writing the job descriptions as part of their first three months work.
MONKEY: Sarah will contact each of them and ask them to email a draft to process. Sarah will also ask them how its going.

What are contingency hours? Gail - shopping for things for meetings, paper, pens.

FREEZER - make sure to budget for an easel for the next fiscal year.

Which jobs are long term?
-archivist
-book of agreements
- convenor?Sarah is willing to do it for the spring and summer.
also maybe after Tammy has her baby Gail can use some contingency time to do the agreements tracking.
- need to increase book of agreements hours - its a big and extremely important job

4. Minutes and Agreements

Are the minutes accessible? Not right now, it used to be archived on yahoo but not any more. Right now the minutes are just being collected in our personal email archives. Not good. Its why the book of agreements is urgent. But it would be nice to have hardcopies of minutes and agreements too.

What about CDs? might be useful as an archiving/backup tool.

Just the agreements themselves, not minutes, in a hardcopy binder? Minutes hardcopies are not searchable and there would be no index, no table of contents. That's really where the power of electronic searches is important. It would be a really big and ongoing job (which Sunward has had to do since many of their members are not on computers) to manually index minutes and agreements in a paper binder and keep the index and table of contents updated etc. But there are not that many agreed on proposals, we could print those out.

MONKEY: Jillian will print out the agreements that she has
MONKEY: Amy H will get a binder

Is the book of agreements going to include minutes? It really needs to, the proposals need the discussion to frame it.

When there's a computer in the common house, can we have Eudora on it, and all the minutes in that. A folder called minutes@gocoho.org. Its easier to search than the wiki? Some people find it easier to search the wiki than others. Or have google index them for us? But won't the book of agreements have searchable minutes? No need to do something twice.

We need to hear from Willie how this database is going to be set up - how are the proposals and the minutes that talk about the proposals going to be linked? Will it be easy to search?

What are our goals?
MONKEY: Sarah will write up a goals doc and email to willie.

Willie said he is going to be working on it now.


5. Mini Process Teaching Moments at Community [[Meeting]]s

We all liked the idea but haven't come up with what we want to do and when. I think we should do something. Listening exercises. Seems like books would have exercises. Jillian has books.
MONKEY: Jillian will ask Tree if she has any suggestions.
MONKEY: Sarah will come look at Jillian's books.


6. Fall Process Training Events

Seems like we should, in the fall. Would be great to have another facilitation training. One day of facilitation training for all 3 communities? then one day of GO only?

What would be the topic for a full-community training? We'd need to decide.

Many people talked about wanting training in conflict resolution. Its a skill we can all use. Conflict is normal, when you have people living together. We need to be able to deal with it well.

another topic is burnout, how to say no, how to recognize burnout in yourself, why its good for the community for you to say no when you really can't do it. Self care.

create a culture where we are all empowered and we can all fix what's wrong, if we feel powerless how do we change that - its a real shift, in many areas of our life we don't have that full and equal responsibility like we do here.

And how to not take things personally, group process can be clumsy, and usually are not aimed at someone personally, but people take things personally.

Seems like we should also have a facilitation training.
Sandra? Bea?

MONKEY: Jillian will ask Bea about her schedule

Another suggestion - Sally Johnson from the U of M HR dept, she has a lot of teaching skills.
MONKEY: Jim Sweeton will talk with her.

MONKEY: Jillian will ask Ruth about Friend's Center, if they have facilitation trainers


7. Conflict Resolution Sub [[Committee]] Check In
We've had a gathering, Tim, Susan and Jim Sw. They made some agreements about how to proceed. Susan and Jim Sw took on the role of moderating the parents discussion group. Tim is a member of that group.
MONKEY: Jim Sw will bring the original conflict res agreement to a meeting as a refresher for people.

8. LiLaCC check in
April 15 is the next one. Heather says she'll email out the minutes soon. Will have a job description at the next meeting, and then each community can take a look at it. next big question is how do the communities communicate. Print newsletter, people making reports at community meetings, wiki site, etc. One person in each community who is the email forwarded.
MONKEY: Gail will be in contact with Ken about the next meeting.

10. Next meeting
Next meeting would be Wed 4/14, Amy H will have to work, Jim Sw will be in Jerusalem. Jillian should be back from NY that day. Sarah needs to check her schedule. Gail will check the calendar but thinks we can meet at her house.