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Thread: 5A9 New Business

  1. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by Christopher Mallon View Post
    I like the forum meetings myself.

    They give us time to consider things.
    They allow for diverse views to be properly articulated.

    A zoom meeting - with 70 people? They won't even all fit on two pages, much less one page.
    How much can each individual VM contribute? A few sentences at best?
    Time constraints may lead to rushed decisions.

    The old in-person AGMs were two days long and many many hours each day. Does anyone really want to sit in on a Zoom call for two days? Plus, a lot of things that happened were done in a "backroom" sort of way, or informally during breaks, which really only works in person.

    I was one of the organizers of an 80 people zoom last month - JUST SAYING ...

  2. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by Patricia Gamliel View Post
    I was one of the organizers of an 80 people zoom last month - JUST SAYING ...
    I never said you couldn't do it (I've been in a Zoom call with 4 pages also) just that it was very far from ideal.
    Christopher Mallon
    FIDE Arbiter

  3. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by Christopher Mallon View Post
    I like the forum meetings myself.

    They give us time to consider things.
    They allow for diverse views to be properly articulated.

    A zoom meeting - with 70 people? They won't even all fit on two pages, much less one page.
    How much can each individual VM contribute? A few sentences at best?
    Time constraints may lead to rushed decisions.

    The old in-person AGMs were two days long and many many hours each day. Does anyone really want to sit in on a Zoom call for two days? Plus, a lot of things that happened were done in a "backroom" sort of way, or informally during breaks, which really only works in person.
    FIDE managed to do an AGM meeting with many more participants in five hours.

  4. #14
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    I suppose it may be possible to have the first 80% of the meeting on the forum website and the last part on Zoom, that would provide an opportunity to consider various options., Or, you could have 60% forum, then 20% Zoom and the last part forum (to allow voting in the forum after the VM's have had time to consider everything said and written before the vote).

  5. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lloyd Lombard View Post
    I suppose it may be possible to have the first 80% of the meeting on the forum website and the last part on Zoom, that would provide an opportunity to consider various options., Or, you could have 60% forum, then 20% Zoom and the last part forum (to allow voting in the forum after the VM's have had time to consider everything said and written before the vote).
    We could have pre-meeting discussions on the forum. The meeting could be on Zoom where following Roberts Rules would be possible though all of the voting members would need to be engaged for the hours of the meeting. The voting could be on the forum or some other platform or even in Zoom as it has that capability.

  6. #16
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    To expand on my earlier post.

    Participation in a Zoom meeting would inevitably be much lower in two important ways -

    1. significantly less voting members would be able to make the time of the meeting, whereas a forum meeting does not require a commitment of time. We are volunteers here.
    2. less people would raise their viewpoints and opinions on issues, because of the zoom format (one person speaks at a time) and time restraints. A forum allows us to voice our opinions on any topic at hand, any time we like.

    The discussion would also be less intelligent - on a forum, one can take their time and think things through before voicing their opinions. In a live discussion if the moment is lost, it may be lost forever.

    A forum's posts are never lost or forgotten. If the unlikely happens, and I happen to call someone a buffoon (or an adolescent, etc, take your pick..) in a forum post - people will be able to read it (and quote it) and make their judgements on my character in days, weeks or months to come. Not so in a live zoom discussion, where words are wind and quickly forgotten. Minutes of the meeting will not be quickly (or at all) available for others to read.

    Overall, zoom meetings will just make the role of voting members less significant then it already is. In my opinion, that is very negative innovation. Zoom meetings for the board of Directors (currently 8 people) are a different kind of animal and are likely a good idea.

  7. #17
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    I do not favor such a change - one of the key reasons being that under the present setup the documents are open for examination at any time and how we made the decisions we made are obvious to all.

    This is incredibly valuable in governance and is lost forever if we go with Zoom or one of its rivals. It also puts a huge additional administrative load on - most of my activities in the first day or two of the meeting are user log-in related and getting everybody where they need to go. By the time we've got all sorted out (especially with the AGM where you have a lot of new people that don't know the software used) it's time to start voting.

    My experience with large Zoom meetings (and I've attended more than 50 in the last year) is that you're either in complete anarchy where everyone speaks at once or many feel they are not heard if the chair is too heavy handed in recognizing people.

    One advantage of this format is that everybody does get their 2 cents worth and can take their time editing and doesn't feel they misspoke themselves. No question we can fine tune (as anybody who has compared the Handbook regulations on online meetings with our general practice has done) knows we've trimmed some of the more bureaucratic stuff Bob A wrote into the original regulations.

    Again we're all here as we have a common goal we support and we're working out the details from there - that's basic parliamentary procedure. Yes the meetings (particularly the last two days) can drag but the last special meeting was a prime example of how we DON'T want a meeting - live, Zoom or forum - to be run as there were times members DIDN'T feel they were being heard particularly in the way the chair challenge was handled. (Which in my opinion Vlad fumbled mostly due to inexperience though long experience in chair challenges is not something you want too much expertise in!)

    Summary: the main problem with Zoom meetings in governance is that unless you have someone taking VERY good minutes and is fully attentive for the whole thing - which is never the case in any long online meeting I've attended - you DON'T get the record of proceedings we get here. Sure we could tweak things and should - but the basic format is sound and in my opinion way more effective in terms of capturing what we decided and why.

  8. #18
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    In a zoom format we could record every meeting and put it on youtube as FIDE did with their online meeting.

    No other non-profit employs such a time wasting format on its board or members. Most non-profits would have a single yearly AGM and not 37 days of meetings as we will have in this year. That is more than 10% of the year spent in meetings.

  9. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vladimir Drkulec View Post
    In a zoom format we could record every meeting and put it on youtube as FIDE did with their online meeting.

    No other non-profit employs such a time wasting format on its board or members. Most non-profits would have a single yearly AGM and not 37 days of meetings as we will have in this year. That is more than 10% of the year spent in meetings.
    FIDE and others have a quite number of committees who work year-around - thus at the end who knows who spend more human-hours overall. FIDE also put on youtube several committee/council meetings what happened during the last congress thus many hours to watch overall.

    The annual meeting shall culminate the work done over the year; and it is not a place for long discussions as members would come with more or less clear minds what shall be decided and how they plan to vote -- the notice of the meeting would have all required information for homework.
    .*-1

  10. #20
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    If we are truly casting off the handbook as is being suggested in another thread then there are many implications for all of our past practices. Some of the voting members may be familiar with zero based budgeting where you constantly reevaluate everything you are doing and decide where it is still relevant.

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