kevin_standlee | Business Meeting Basics Video

Here's the promised video that describes the basics of parliamentary business meeting mechanics, including how to speak in debate and the most common ways we count votes.

Once again I thank those of you who stayed after the Westercon 68 Business Meeting in San Diego to sit around and demonstrate meeting mechanics. In retrospect, I would have been better off to sit there and read the narration for the section about being recognized in debate so that the sound quality was the same as everything else in the video, but after a lot of fiddling with microphones and amplifiers, Lisa managed to get things matched decently closely. Besides, the order in which I ended up cutting the video of debate mechanics was significantly different from the way I originally wrote it, so it probably would have needed to be re-recorded anyway.

We definitely learned some things from doing this video. I need to be better about setting out exactly what I wanted in each shot. Lisa needs to learn that if something messes up the shot, like people walking into the frame, or her needing to make an adjustment in the middle of the shot, it's okay for her to stop the shot and do it again. As she told me, this is different from all of the documentary footage she's been doing of Fannish Inquisitions and Business Meetings, because you have the luxury of doing the shot again if it doesn't work the first time.

Editing is a pain, though. This video runs just under eight minutes. It ended up taking me about one hour of editing time per one minute of final footage. I'm told that's not that unusual.

I hope this video helps people who aren't familiar with our normal practices in deliberative assembly debates under formal parliamentary-law rules. I know this can be intimidating to newcomers. While I can't have the WSFS Business Meeting be a seminar in Robert's Rules of Order, I do want to make it clear that those of us running the meetings aren't trying to use the rules to silence people, but to allow a large group of people with diverse and conflicting opinions to reach a decision in an orderly and fair manner.

By the way, there are panels scheduled immediately after the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday Business Meetings (in a smaller room nearby) to discuss the technical aspects of each day's meeting. That's the place to go if you want to hear in more detail why things went the way they did. If you're really interested in learning more about how to make the rules work for you, I recommend putting off lunch until after the "What Just Happened?" panels on those days.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Nice job! Audio is nice and clear, and reasonably uniform throughout, and visuals actually support and illustrate the audio.

Reminds me of a question I've always had about procedure -- why is the motion to vote on what I think of as the "current" question described as the "previous question"?

Thank you! I'm sort of impressed with myself on one thing: I recorded the narration for that section on being recognized in debate after I'd put the graphics on the screen, and could only look at it out of the corner of my eye as I was reading the script. Yet I seem to have hit all of the marks.

I have no idea why the motion to Close Debate (sometimes "Call the Question") is called "Previous Question," and Robert's Rules doesn't say why; however, the motion by that name goes at least as far back as the US Constitutional Convention. There's surely a reason deep in the bowels of parliamentary history that I don't know.

The Standard Code (the rival book to RONR) says the name is confusing and says to call it "Close Debate." That's why I mention it by both names, and I don't insist upon people using the exact technical form. That's consistent with my practice of trying to listen to what people say and rephrasing it for them in the correct technical form. For example, a motion "table the motion until Sunday," translates into "that the consideration of the motion be postponed until Sunday," and is the motion Postpone Definitely, not Lay on the Table.

Okay, I'll accept that it's something of a mystery. Still curious, then.

I approve of your "helpful chairman" approach; especially for a body of amateurs that meets infrequently.

Heck, I'm only an informed amateur myself. I didn't study hard enough and failed my exam to get my professional certification of Registered Parliamentarian from the National Association of Parliamentarians. I then stopped paying attention, let my dues lapse, and never got back around to it. I still have my old membership card, though.

I'd suspect that "previous question" uses the definition of "previous" as "most recent". I suppose it is possible to have numerous questions on the stack, so to speak. So you need to call the previous question and dispose of it in order to pop the stack.

Does that make sense?

That's possible. You certainly can have a bunch of motions stacked up. I don't think I've ever seen WSFS go more than about four or five deep. I heard at meeting of the local chapter of NAP that some lunatic figured out a way to get more than 100 motions on the stack.

Previous Question can be called upon just the most immediately-pending motion, or on the entire stack, or anything in between. If not specified, it only affects the immediately-pending motion, but it then yields to a motion for the Previous Question with a broader scope, so if there were five motions in the stack, you could conceivably get five more PQ's moved in increasing scope. I hope nobody tries such a stunt, though.

I'm sorry I had to leave before the recording - but something came up that needed the con chair's attention. These things happen.

Hey, I understand! I'm glad we still had a handful of people left to demonstrate procedure. And once again, kudos to your team for supporting our insane last-minute technical requests. Westercon 68 has made this year's Worldcon Business Meeting better already, I think.

Very clear and comprehensible. FYI: typo in "Individuals".

Yep. I'm waiting a while to see if anyone turns up anything else. YouTube doesn't let you replace an existing video, so when I upload a corrected copy, the original, if deleted, produces a bunch of dead links. Instead, all I can do is put comments on it saying, "this version is out of date; go see this instead."

Quite interesting, given that I come from wholly another tradition of how to run formal meetings (ie the Swedish one).

You want to describe how your deliberative assemblies work?

You want me to write how much?

First big difference is that we don't have a large single set of rules, comparable to RROO. Instead, most organisations that I've encountered have slightly different traditions, but still developed from a common core of the late-19th-century popular movements here (the main ones being the labour movement, the temperance movement, and the "free church" movement).

The leave to talk is much more managed. Anyone can signal to the chair about leave to talk at any time (usually by raising their hand - in very large formal meetings a written note must be used); the chair maintains a list over who is to speak and calls out whose turn it is. Nowadays, it is common to use a doubled list over speakers - those who have talked earlier in the same topic gets less time to talk and have to wait.

(Points of orders and "repliker" - direct replies only allowed when another person at the meeting has mentioned you explicitly - break the chair's list.)

Votes are usually taken by raising ones hands as the chair asks the question. Formal counting is done by two (or more) elected officials, who usually also affirm the correctness of the notes of the meeting.

I could go into our way of handling two or more proposals that are in some way related or mutually contradictory, or the various forms of points of order. "Streck i debatten" - a point of order that the debate and the motions should be limited - is especially interesting.

Interesting, and thank you. I suspect I could find analogies to the things you list in various groups in American practice. I've had people who want me to make lists of people who want to speak in favor and against a proposal, and call on them in turn. I've resisted this because it doesn't let the debate flow as well as I would like. By the time we get to you, the point to which you want to reply may have already passed by. The California State Association of Parliamentarians required one to submit everything, including procedural motions, in writing. (This is very tempting, given the expected size of our meeting.)

There are equivalent procedural motions to limit debate that you describe. RONR has simply grown fairly complex, having accumulated a lot of stuff over 150 years.

The basic reason Robert wrote the first edition was that he tried to preside over a meeting in San Francisco, and there were so many different "traditional" ways of meeting operation in play (because of the melting-pot nature of SF) that the result was chaos. He wanted order and imposed it by writing rules that drew from the practice of the US House of Representatives, modified for practical use in smaller assemblies. Mind you, it's not impossible that this year's WSFS Business Meeting will have more people in it than the US House of Representatives (435 elected members).

Yeah, once you hit more than (I guess) 150 people in the meeting or get lots of proposals, then the need for going ultra-formal becomes much larger. And here you will probably get a huge meeting and vigorous debate.

Business Meeting Basics Video

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