I participated in a meeting on campus today that wound up dealing with politics more than anything else. I was having a really hard time trying to figure out why the problem being defined was worth such extreme polarization and strategy worthy of a Pentagon scenario, or at least an episode of Survivor. Actually, I still haven’t figured that part out, but will do my best to contribute to the group as appropriate.
Oy.
I participated in a meeting on campus today that wound up dealing with politics more than anything else. I was having a really hard time trying to figure out why the problem being defined was worth such extreme polarization and strategy worthy of a Pentagon scenario, or at least an episode of Survivor. Actually, I still haven’t figured that part out, but will do my best to contribute to the group as appropriate.
Oy.
One of the great comments on my BCEdOnline2006 Unkeynote Debriefing included a link to a wiki page by Chris Corrigan on Open Space Technology – a set of ideas, practices and guidelines for conducting “open space” meetings. Very cool stuff, and it resonated quite well with what we got to do as part of Northern Voice 2006 – specifically the Social Software Salon and the Edublogger Hootenanny. I finally had a chance to go through the linked wiki page, and it’s chock full of goodness. I don’t think it has to go as far down the kumbaya spectrum as Chris describes – even just the arrangement of the chairs sends a powerful message and sets expectations.
When they work, open space meetings are incredible. Dynamic, interesting, engaging.
When they don’t work, they sort of devolve into what appears to be chaos. It isn’t chaos for everyone, but you have to dig to see the good stuff.
One of the strikes against us at the BCEdOnline Unkeynote was the design of the room, and the layout of the chairs. With all chairs neatly arranged in rows, pointing to the front, it’s harder to engage individuals. We jokingly suggested that we should have turned the standing microphones around so you had to face the audience to speak, but I think even that small gesture would have helped. I’m not convinced that the number of attendees was too high, in and of itself. With proper layout and organization of the physical space, this open meeting concept should scale. There must be a way to experiment with that…
One of the great comments on my BCEdOnline2006 Unkeynote Debriefing included a link to a wiki page by Chris Corrigan on Open Space Technology – a set of ideas, practices and guidelines for conducting “open space” meetings. Very cool stuff, and it resonated quite well with what we got to do as part of Northern Voice 2006 – specifically the Social Software Salon and the Edublogger Hootenanny. I finally had a chance to go through the linked wiki page, and it’s chock full of goodness. I don’t think it has to go as far down the kumbaya spectrum as Chris describes – even just the arrangement of the chairs sends a powerful message and sets expectations.
When they work, open space meetings are incredible. Dynamic, interesting, engaging.
When they don’t work, they sort of devolve into what appears to be chaos. It isn’t chaos for everyone, but you have to dig to see the good stuff.
One of the strikes against us at the BCEdOnline Unkeynote was the design of the room, and the layout of the chairs. With all chairs neatly arranged in rows, pointing to the front, it’s harder to engage individuals. We jokingly suggested that we should have turned the standing microphones around so you had to face the audience to speak, but I think even that small gesture would have helped. I’m not convinced that the number of attendees was too high, in and of itself. With proper layout and organization of the physical space, this open meeting concept should scale. There must be a way to experiment with that…
Just got back from the AGM at the Tuscany Club. One of the less eventful AGMs we’ve had (which is a Good Thing™), especially with Carma nearly done with planning the rest of their development.
- New member of the board of directors
Kelly Taylor also represents the Tuscany Community Association, so there will be some nice connections there. All of the board members should be more active in the TCA as well…
The existing 7 board members were re-elected, with Kelly added as a new one.
- We’re going to have a really hard time meeting quorum in the next year or two. Carma still holds over 500 votes, so we were able to make the ~500 required voting member quorum this time. But, as Carma sells off their lots, the number of votes they hold drops. In the next year or two, that will drop us below the automatically-meeting-quorum waterline. We had 30 proxies mailed in from members, and maybe a dozen (perhaps as high as 20? I don’t have the roll call handy) voting members turned up at the meeting. Which means, after Carma is done, we would have had 50 votes tops, leaving us 450 short. We’ll have to do some thinking about this. There are ways to handle missed quorum, but it just becomes a pain (scheduling two meetings, one week apart, and holding the “real” meeting on the later one because nobody showed up to the first one…)
- “official” meeting ended in record time – 14:59 after the meeting opened. Bob thankfully rushed through the official legal business. Wah wah wawawah wah blah blah 🙂
- Unofficial meeting/discussion begins
- Home Depot to build a store on the northwest corner of the Tuscany Hill Drive and Nose Hill Drive intersection
It’s going to be modelled after the 16th Ave. store, perhaps with some influence from the West Vancouver store
- TRA to take over management of the Tuscany-Connect website in 2006. Karen’s already in training to handle the day-to-day management of the site. I’ve got some really mixed feelings on this one. We need to be taking responsibility for our services, so it makes sense to take over from Carma on this. But, we had no say in which solution was deployed for Tuscany-Connect (we approved the Carma-recommended BuildACommunity software), and no say in the technologies used on the back end. Now, we’re saddled with something that I was just told is powered by MS Access on the back end. MS Access? WTF? Netcraft reports that it’s currently served via Verio Inc., so maybe it’s just a matter of us paying the invoices for hosting rather than Carma…
Update: Just checked the specs for BuildACommunity, and it looks like it’s all Perl and MySQL, running on Linux and Apache. Might not be too bad after all – wonder why Karen is taking Access training though. Still, I get the feeling we could have rolled something in Drupal for next to nothing, and be able to extend the system ourselves…
- We need to run another survey of the TRA members to see what they want/need from their association, and what kinds of programming they want to see run at the Tuscany Club. The last one we ran was through Tuscany-Connect – an online service – and it generated a small forest’s worth of dead trees for reports. Perhaps we should use a simpler online survey tool this time…
Just got back from the AGM at the Tuscany Club. One of the less eventful AGMs we’ve had (which is a Good Thing™), especially with Carma nearly done with planning the rest of their development.
- New member of the board of directors
Kelly Taylor also represents the Tuscany Community Association, so there will be some nice connections there. All of the board members should be more active in the TCA as well…
The existing 7 board members were re-elected, with Kelly added as a new one.
- We’re going to have a really hard time meeting quorum in the next year or two. Carma still holds over 500 votes, so we were able to make the ~500 required voting member quorum this time. But, as Carma sells off their lots, the number of votes they hold drops. In the next year or two, that will drop us below the automatically-meeting-quorum waterline. We had 30 proxies mailed in from members, and maybe a dozen (perhaps as high as 20? I don’t have the roll call handy) voting members turned up at the meeting. Which means, after Carma is done, we would have had 50 votes tops, leaving us 450 short. We’ll have to do some thinking about this. There are ways to handle missed quorum, but it just becomes a pain (scheduling two meetings, one week apart, and holding the “real” meeting on the later one because nobody showed up to the first one…)
- “official” meeting ended in record time – 14:59 after the meeting opened. Bob thankfully rushed through the official legal business. Wah wah wawawah wah blah blah 🙂
- Unofficial meeting/discussion begins
- Home Depot to build a store on the northwest corner of the Tuscany Hill Drive and Nose Hill Drive intersection
It’s going to be modelled after the 16th Ave. store, perhaps with some influence from the West Vancouver store
- TRA to take over management of the Tuscany-Connect website in 2006. Karen’s already in training to handle the day-to-day management of the site. I’ve got some really mixed feelings on this one. We need to be taking responsibility for our services, so it makes sense to take over from Carma on this. But, we had no say in which solution was deployed for Tuscany-Connect (we approved the Carma-recommended BuildACommunity software), and no say in the technologies used on the back end. Now, we’re saddled with something that I was just told is powered by MS Access on the back end. MS Access? WTF? Netcraft reports that it’s currently served via Verio Inc., so maybe it’s just a matter of us paying the invoices for hosting rather than Carma…
Update: Just checked the specs for BuildACommunity, and it looks like it’s all Perl and MySQL, running on Linux and Apache. Might not be too bad after all – wonder why Karen is taking Access training though. Still, I get the feeling we could have rolled something in Drupal for next to nothing, and be able to extend the system ourselves…
- We need to run another survey of the TRA members to see what they want/need from their association, and what kinds of programming they want to see run at the Tuscany Club. The last one we ran was through Tuscany-Connect – an online service – and it generated a small forest’s worth of dead trees for reports. Perhaps we should use a simpler online survey tool this time…
