![Minutes: Process 2005-02-09 [Minutes]](display/images/gocohologo.gif)
Process minutes: 2005-02-09
Minutes:
[[Transclude [[ProcessCommittee]]ShortcutBar]]----
Process Cmtee
2/9/05
7pm
Present: Sarah, Jillian, and 1/4 [[Elph]] (mostly he was working on gocoho.org system trouble)
'''Agenda'''
1. Agenda Review
2. Check ins
3. Monkey review
4. Review/approve archives spending request
5. Discuss other meeting locations besides the sitting room for our Wednesday night meetings
6. Discuss and assign membership packet info as requested by membership
7. Revisiting Consensus Decisions, which community meeting?
8. Discuss and schedule "GO agreement reminders" for upcoming community meetings re: past consensed on decisions
9. Training, next steps
10. Empowerment
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'''LIST OF AGREEMENTS MADE AT TONITE'S MEETING:'''
- AGREED: approved Gail's request to spend $56.20 from her budget line item for archive materials.
- AGREED: the second Wednesday process meetings can often be at Jillian's house, Work cmtee would like to use the CH sitting room, and Jim Sweeton is not able to be at the Wednesday process meetings until summer.
'''3. MONKEYS'''
DONE MONKEYS:
DONE: Jillian will check in with Willie about the electronic version of BoA- Sarah, Jillian and Willie will meet on Saturday
DONE: Jillian will check in with Alicia about the list she was putting together about people who say they want tasks but can't be on a committee. Alicia said she still plans to do this.
DONE: Jillian will find out about Julie Mazo. Julie Mazo is in Uganda right now but said we could chat in April about future training stuff.
DONE: Sarah will write a brief sentence book of agreements tech for [[Rod]]
DONE: Jillian will write a sentence or two for BOA data entry for [[Rod]]
DONE: Jillian will email something about facilitation to [[Rod]]
DONE: Sarah will email minute taker, timekeeper, scribe to [[Rod]]
DONE - Sarah - ask Laird if he would consider $1000 for a training day, which would still leave us enough to do something small in the fall
DONE - Sarah - if we're on the way for Laird, find out how much are travel expenses
DONE - Sarah - ask Laird about Monday evening 11/14
DONE - email process cmtee the message Laird emailed Sarah
RE-MONKEYS from previous minutes:
Partially done: Re-MONKEY: Jillian will keep working on Book of Agreements.
ONGOING - Re-MONKEY: Sarah will let Sunward and TS know about what we're thinking re training, maybe they could hire Laird (or whoever it is) for a second day after he has done work at GO. or if we do a subset training, like facilitation etc on a specific skill, then we could all attend together.
Presentations
Re-MONKEY: Sarah will check in with Mary King and Melisa about short meeting presentations
Re-MONKEY: Sarah and Melisa will bring [[Committee]] Effectiveness Proposal - coming back to a process meeting on 2/22.
Re-MONKEY: Sarah to check with Melisa about if she emailed something to [[Rod]] re [[InfoCo]]
Re-MONKEY: maybe Jim Sweeton could present Revisiting Consensus? Seems like it would make sense for those who did the most thinking about it, to just explain the thought processes that went into it. And then lots of discussion will be needed, to give people time to digest the philosophy of it.
NEW MONKEYS FROM TONITE:
MONKEY: Sarah will look at the list of convenors and committees that process put together for the Oct 16 training (Jillian emailed it to her)
MONKEY: Jillian will copy the consensus decision flowchart from the Book of Agreements
MONKEY: Sarah will write an intro paragraph for the Consensus Decision Making Overview
MONKEY: Jillian will write a brief intro about the committee structure
MONKEY: Sarah will write something up about community training and will bring the conflict res proposal.
MONKEY: Sarah and Jillian will meet at 1pm on Saturday to finish this off so we can get something to Malcolm in one chunk.
MONKEY: Jim Sweeton could hopefully present the Revisiting consensus proposal at the first meeting in March - the 2nd meeting in Feb several processians will be out of town, including [[Elph]]
MONKEY: Sarah will print out the Revisiting Consensus proposal when that date gets closer.
MONKEY: Jillian will check in with buildings about the basement build-out proposal - we realized it is not in the book of agreements, very important that it be passed. Ask Gail if she has it in the archives.
MONKEY: Sarah will write up a brief outline for committees, on how to review a proposal at a community meeting.
MONKEY: Sarah will bring the community info we got the last time we solicited feedback on what kinds of training to do, to the next process meeting.
MONKEY: Sarah will look for Laird's email question about bringing a student - not sure if that email went to process cmtee or not
MONKEY: Jillian will check in with Michael about the FIC house party idea, see if Sunward might be interested. Jillian will let Laird know we're talking about it.
MONKEY: Sarah will look back in her documents for a diagram Shari Leach drew, with 4 quarants, about when decisions can be made at various levels (individual, committee, community?)
MONKEY: Sarah will look at the material Melisa had gathering about committees and how they function, might have pieces about empowerment
MONKEY: Jillian will see if Tree has any helpful docs about this to share
MONKEY: Jillian will email something about this out to "talk"
'''4. Review/approve archives spending request'''
Gail would like to spend $56.20 plus some amount for shipping, for large storage box for GO plans and photo album pages. Her total amount of money is $75 for the year. We know she shopped around. Good idea to get a box for the plans, they just float around otherwise. Seems fine. AGREED, fine to go ahead.
'''5. Discuss other meeting locations besides the sitting room for our Wednesday night meetings'''
The second Wednesday there is a conflict for the sitting room, Work cmtee would like to use it. Jillian doesn't mind hosting. We used to meet at Jim Sweeton's too but he is not available on Wednesdays for a while.
'''6. Discuss and assign membership packet info as requested by membership'''
I was hoping we could decide what resources we already have that we can draw on and asking people to follow up on specific ones.
- Review the list of committees and convenors we put together for Oct 16.
MONKEY: Sarah will do that.
- What is consenus, outline model
[[Elph]] and I wrote a document for the Oct 16 training - Consensus Decision Making Overview.
MONKEY: Jillian will xerox the flowchart from the Book of Agreements
MONKEY: Sarah will write an intro paragraph
- how to go about changing things in the community
In book of agreements there is a page about how to write a proposal. could also say, see committee job descriptions for what each cmtee works on. Do we need a brief description of structure. And steering cmtee is a place that people can ask questions.
MONKEY: Jillian will write a brief intro about the structure
Should the cmtee job descriptions be included? Seems like that would be too long. Maybe print out the summaries from the wiki?
MONKEY: Sarah will write something up on community training and will pull out the conflict res proposal.
MONKEY: Sarah and Jillian will meet at 1pm on Saturday to finish this off so we can get something to Malcolm in one chunk.
'''7. Revisiting Consensus Decisions, which community meeting?'''
[[Elph]] and Sarah and Jillian will all miss the next community meeting. Maybe Jim could present it for initial discussion the first meeting in March? If we wait then [[Elph]] will be able to be there to be part of the discussion.
MONKEY: Sarah will print it out when that gets closer.
'''8. Discuss and schedule "GO agreement reminders" for upcoming community meetings re: past consensed on decisions'''
Its in the process mandate to keep already-made decisions fresh in people's minds so we remember the work we've done, don't reinvent the wheel, respect the work of the group instead of rehashing things.
Sarah wrote up some info on this, nice job!
Seems like the "short consensus trainings" we've been talking about could go under "General info on community processes".
Sarah made a list of agreements, from the book of agreements - is this everything? I think so, everything that was really consensed on by the group. There are some messy sort-of-agreements from the design and construction process that are not in here, they were not really "proposals". They would be in those programming books, some of them. Not sure how relevant they are any more but they are part of our past.
Media guideiines - we talked about bringing a broader piece to the community for consensus.
How long between reviews of cmtee job descriptions? Maybe review some committees at 2 years and some at 3 years so we don't have them all in the same year and then go at 2 year intervals. And committees can do this themselves at any time of course.
Maybe we can prioritize the proposals, perhaps not all of them will need to be reviewed. Some are seasonal, might be wise to pull out the grounds trees/shrubs proposal soon, and some others, A/C.
MONKEY: Jillian will check in with buildings about the basement buildout proposal - important that it be passed. Ask Gail if she has it in the archives.
Giving committees an outline to follow, would that be helpful to do? Seems like it would be. Why was it written - what need was it meeting, background info, and the gist of the proposal.
MONKEY: Sarah will take a stab at it.
We could do these reviews a few times, and then ask people how its going. Do people need to have printouts, or is the person summarizing it ok?
If we can set up a system maybe this will become easier to do.
Some proposals might be easier to review than others.
We could leave it up to committees about printing it out - if its detailed enough please print it out. eg the grounds proposals.
'''9. Training on June 18'''
How to get feedback from the community about what to have the training focus on.
And Laird's idea of the FIC party.
I got confused when Laird talked about working on a hot issue, I was talking about training.
A quote from Laird: "best would be if there's a presenting issue which illuminates the challenge, so that we could immediately apply the theory to something practical." I think Laird is used to being called in to cohousing communities in crisis.
We need to define our terms if we want him to meet our expectations.
If we decide we want diversity training for example. What kinds of things would we bring forward that have come up at GO? I bet we have examples.
- different physical capacities - assumptions about who is having a problem.
- assumptions about socio economic background, assumptions about ethnic background. We all generally tend to assume people see the world the way we do. We have a tendency to overlook the ways that we don't and that can feel disrespectful. And the more we understand how we each look at the world. The easier it is to be in discussions about issues together and to hear eachother. We recognize that others are not making the same assumptions that we are. Calls us to be more accountable for our own perspectives and choices too - you think about your prefernces and why you have them.
We could go back and look at the feedback we got last time, see what we think we've already done, ask if there are new suggestions, maybe do a dot storm about priorities, after the committee has thought about suggestions.
I remember from last time there were a lot of connections that showed up amongst the ideas.
People seemed to like the nonviolent communication training in Oct, but it was very short. If that is going to be a useful tool its something we'd need to keep working on.
That is conflict resolution related.
But for some people that did not resonate.
But many models will be similar, we could try a different angle, Laird's model for dealing with conflict.
So for the Feb 22 process meeting, we could look at the dot storm from last time.
MONKEY: Sarah will bring the material
COOLER: Side thing - should we have an evaluation form at the end of the training, so people can write down comments? Might help us know what people thought about it more indepth. Do we have a model we could just use. Or we could make up questions
Laird said something about a student - sarah will look for that email.
RE the whole weekend idea.
I think the idea of an all-day saturday thing for GO. and then Sunday and advanced facilitation thing for whoever wanted to.
Laird's idea of the FIC house party on Friday night - would be open to the public, come see Great Oak, come learn about cohousing, learn about FIC and the community networking that it does. Not dinner, snacks it sounds like - 7:30 pm on that Friday night?
We don't have any money for Sunday so we could host the FIC party as an exchange. Laird would be selling FIC memberships, cmags, maybe bookshelf books at the Friday party.
We would have to work to get the word out, to other community groups in town etc.
MONKEY: Jillian will check in with Michael about the FIC house party idea, see if Sunward might be interested. Jillian will let Laird know we're talking about it.
'''10. Empowerment'''
Can we divide empowerment into some kind of levels or categories?
The empowerment of spending the money is simple, the community has approved their overall budget. No one else can spend that money, they are supposed to spend it to fulfill their mandate. The community does not want to hear about the CH committee choosing to buy a certain brand of toilet paper.
Next level though is implications around decisions that a committee makes, when spending their money, that cause larger waves - maybe spending money triggers things, causes you to make decisions that have implications for many people or affects many people. An example is childcare. If membership cmtee decides to spend less on childcare in their annual budget, they therefore limit themselves to younger people with less experience based on their budget. That decision affects a lot of people. Has nothing to do with the idea of them being allowed to spend the money.
third level, where you push the bounds of what the committee really should be working on, policy level stuff.
it seems to me like it would be hard to discern between these levels sometimes.
Could we just ask committees to clearly define a process that the committee uses to make decisions? Making sure that decisions are accessible.
Communication, is a fine thing. Allows the community to relax around committee decisions. This is different though, from where is it obvious that a committee is within its rights to make a decision and where does it get questionable, if the implications are larger and they should bring it to the full group. How can we help committees see that line?
An underlying question for that is, how does a committee get feedback?
Don't you need though, the understanding of what is not within their realm?
The underlying thing that defines what is in a committee's realm is their mandate, to me. Would be reasonable to review the committee's mandate and then check in with the committee about how they see it to be in their mandate.
These are checks and balances. Don't you need clear guidelines first? Seems like we need to back up. We're missing a piece in the middle.
There's something about the nature of the decision, we're trying to draw lines in the sand here.
How do committees know when to bring things to the full group?
Do you remember Shari Leach drawing a diagram, 4 quadrants, and you could place issues within them - these kinds of issues can be decided in committees these in full community. That might help us.
MONKEY: Sarah will look back in her documents for it.
seems like a message should go out to committees about this now though - that process thinks all job descriptions should be consensed on. And need to remind committees that the reason they are doing this work is they are working in service to the full community - the full community sees this work as a need and wants it to happen. And also the community needs to know how to give feedback.
bare minimum of procedures should be followed:
- Agenda announced ahead of time, with decision to to be made highlighted
- put monkeys, agreements, and pending decisions at top of minutes
- put minutes on bulletin board
- at committee reports at the community meeting, if you know you're going to be making a decision at the next committee meeting, announce that.
A committee just might not realize that something they think is a small piece is part of a larger whole, connected in to a larger question. Then things might blow up. But it might not blow up until after they've done a lot of work. Mess prevention is the idea here. Clear clean delegation so the full community meeting does not have to do everything and so committees don't work hard and then have things blow up in their face.
MONKEY: Jillian - ask Tree if she has any handouts about committee empowerment.
Melisa covered some of this in her committee proposal - she had some info in there, Sarah will look.
There may not be clearcut answer, so you need a clear cut procedure for ways that items can be considered, discussed. Steps to go thru to help people, and over time develop experience to recognize what might be a larger issue, community issue, need wider discussion.