[cyb.tachyon]

There is a LANKnights Staff Meeting tonight at 10:00pm in the LANKnights Mumble channel (this is a Staff Meeting, so it will be heavily moderated by the Staff). The reason that this is being posted to members here is partly due to my failing to realize that the original decision by our last President to keep all Staff meetings private does not carry through to the new Presidency, and the constitution should have been thoroughly reviewed by our new President upon appointment.

I'm not not speaking for the Staff here:
I'm very sorry to post this so late; it won't happen again and the overlooked part of the constitution that mandates that Staff meetings are open to eligible members unless otherwise noted. This will be brought up in the meeting. It's my responsibility to keep abreast of the constitution, and I apologize for forgotting about this section until Adrian reminded me.

Quote

Section 2: Officer Meetings
The officers should meet at least three times during the fall and spring semesters. Meetings are open to those defined in Article III, Section 1, and officers except the President, unless otherwise stated. Each Officer is allowed one vote per motion. The quorum required to conduct business is a majority of the officers. Unless otherwise stated in this constitution, a motion is considered passed with a majority vote.

Section 3: Calling Meetings
The President will be in charge of calling meetings and the Secretary will be responsible for notifying all members and/or officers at least 3 days in advance, by e-mail and/or telephone. A majority vote of the officers or active student members may also call a meeting.

This post has been edited by cyb.tachyon: 10 November 2011 - 08:59 PM

[MajorLag]

So I had the opportunity to sit in on the officer meeting the other night and couldn’t help but notice that it was a lot less effective and a lot more time consuming than it probably should have been. I figured since this thread is here, I may as well try to come up with some constructive criticism and pretend it’s a feedback thread. Take it or leave it, it doesn’t make a difference to me since I’m not staff. I’ll be honest though, a lot of this stuff was driving me nuts during the meeting, but I didn’t want to interrupt people for it. Don’t worry, I’m going keep it vague (don’t want to be calling people out) and I’m just going to talk about the delivery, not the content if the meeting or my views on it.

The main problem I think I saw was that the discussion rarely stayed on track, which funny enough lead to the fact that the primary issue of the meeting was never actually resolved before people had to leave. What I noticed was happening was really a lack of listening skills. Most of the time, someone would argue a point, and instead of making a counterpoint, that other person would argue something that was actually completely different. As a result the argument was just going in circles.

One of the most frequent things that I saw was that most of the time, points were argued that had no proof or backing whatsoever. And even worse, were times when proof was provided that was flat out wrong or plain irrelevant, as if to dodge the issue. I realize this isn’t a presidential debate or anything, but seriously, if you’re staff in a meeting, you should at least act as if you were accountable for the things you said. It’s really not that difficult. If you don’t have evidence of something, don’t argue it as if it were fact. The opposite is also true. If someone has made a point against you that sounds sketchy, ask for the proof. If the person doesn’t have any, then that’s less BS fogging up the discussion and if he does have proof, then you just learned something new.

Similar to what was said before, the shifting focus was also pretty unbearable. Honestly, I couldn’t tell if it was a mistake, listening issue, or a petty attempt to make their argument look good, but I noticed that the focus of the argument would be consistently shifted to suit what someone said. The best example of this is when one of the staff was saying that a certain thing was common in the past, and then after a few minutes of argument, it was decided that the focus of the discussion would be things that happened this semester. Not five minutes later was a point argued (comically by one of the people who pushed for the focus to be recent events) using a very specific event that happened almost a year ago. Hell, even “proof” (and believe me I’m using the word very, very loosely) was tossed around in the same way.

I don’t think there was really a problem with the way the meeting was actually carried out from an organization standpoint, but it may be worth trying to use someone as a moderator to help facilitate the discussion. Instead of people consistently getting cut off or the topic being shifted, if you had someone there to guide the arguments, then that might help. If anything, the fact that having someone do this will slow down the pace, may make things more effective. At first I was thinking the secretary could do it, although they would probably be busy enough with the minutes. Maybe the president, I don’t know. Just a suggestion though.

This post has been edited by MajorLag: 12 November 2011 - 01:06 PM

[cyb.tachyon]

MajorLag, on 12 November 2011 - 01:05 PM, said:

(Feedback)

Thanks for your input! I can guarantee that a member of staff has read your post, and would like to thank you again for the time you put into your response. Hopefully at a future point in time you will see results based on your feedback.