Research-May-7-2007

From Common Energy UVic

This page is the minutes for the Research team on May 7, 2007.

Present: (Dan Pollock, Jamie Biggar, Naomi Devine, Mark Chandler)

Meeting start: 4:50pm, B028

Agenda:

1) Why have people stopped coming to team meetings?

Dan: explained people have found it frustrating when meetings do not start on time, when there is a very unstructured agenda, and when people are unsure of the decisions that have been made.

Naomi: We must also consider the time of year has been busy for students.

Dan: There are some people who stopped coming to meetings well before they were busy. There is now a core group of ten, and when three or four people are away, the meetings are very sparse.

Jamie: People have dropped out because they do no longer see the value of meetings, as they are often not involved in decisions.

Dan: many of the decisions were not actually made in coffee shops, as opposed to actually in meetings.

Dan: in meetings we need to discuss items of greater significance bigger than what paper to use, which room to book, etc...

Jamie: Because we were often making things up as we went along, some people were turned off by a lack of organization. We have also pushed our organizational capacity as far as possible.

Dan: the timeline currently does not even list the retreat - it needs to be updated.

Dan: Because we are pushing things so quickly, things are not being done properly. As a result, this may be pushing people away. Decisions and minutes are never official, because they are never approved at the following meeting.

Jamie: There has been no legal authority in the organization.

Naomi: Wants to create a list of possible reasons why things have gone wrong:

• meetings not starting on time; overly unstructured meetings;
• overly flexible in order to give people the capacity to take initiative;
• proper notification of meetings;
• where does decision making actually happen;
• better information sharing;
• follow though and polish.

Mark: the deeper seeded issue is that the core people are over-committed, so many things are being missed.

Dan: we are over-promising and under-achieving. If we have overly ambitious goals, and then we get caught dealing with pushing things book.

Jamie: we need to have big, inspiring goals.

Dan: we can still have these goals, we just need balanced implementation.

Dan: our meetings are quite social, however social meetings exclude people who are not a part of the group.

Mark: meetings need to be efficient, because it is frustrating to those who are not in on the social component, and for those who are tired.

Dan: we need to finish things and have accomplishments - for example, the minutes style guide.

Jamie: suggested having all meetings start on time, with a review of the previous week's agenda.

Mark: We should make facilitator protocol.

DECISIONS:

• Naomi to add decisions to meeting protocol page, and have every team meeting review and post comments by Thursday, and development to implement the final decision. For example, that meetings should begin on time with a review of the previous meetings minutes.
• Naomi to design facilitator protocol.