Business Meeting Basics Video

[kevin_standlee]

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.

Comments

[kjn]

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.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

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).

[kjn]

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.