Signed Meeting Itinerary Made Easy

Signed meeting itinerary

on the order of business this is chapter 11 page 351 so this is really all about agendas and it's something that we've all maybe have taken for granted in the past but it's one of those areas where you really have to be on top of what's going on because the Devils in the details so the the base assumption is if the chair has the responsibility of proposing an agenda and it's their responsibility to make sure that everything is is if the people want to talk about are built into the agenda so you don't have to have a food fight the assembly may amend the agenda and the assembly has to approve the agenda and even if the agenda is distributed in advance it is not official until the assembly approves it and this is really important everyone you know it's it's it's this whole thing of us being sheeple and letting our rights being taken away from us the the chair does not have the right to impose an agenda upon membership the the chair has a responsibility to to create the best agenda they can and then the assembly gets to amend it if they need to if the Assembly decides to spend the two hours allocated for the meeting playing bingo that is their prerogative if a majority votes to do so it's it's really gets down to the concept of the majority owning the decision-making on the next slide is the order of business so this is not this is not an agenda but this is the order of business in which organizations should run their meetings when they have that specified an order of business in their bylaws so the first item is the reading and approval of the minutes and the reason why this is important is because this is the record of what had gone on in the past and from time to time you often need to refresh your memory on things and you have decided upon previously and that is why the minutes are so important to be kept and kept accurate after the reading and approval the minutes then you get the reports of officers boards and standing committees and then you get the reports of special committees and then you have special orders and then the second the last topic is unfinished business and then the final topic is new business and we're going to go through the what each of these sections meet in the coming slides so just to help out and clarity and what an agenda should look like this is a fairly simple agenda you can may have agendas that are more elaborate and if you want to you can assign durations to each of the agenda items but then that kind of ties you into completing the agenda items as you as you progress with the meeting so the the key things running is it for an agenda is that you have a name of the organization those meeting the date time of the meeting and when it's called to order you have the agenda items numbered and then you have the topic and I always like to put who owns each of the topics because then if you circulate the agenda in advance people can look through the agenda and they might have forgotten that they were on a committee that has a report due and then this gives them an opportunity to to catch up so the you might have what they call ceremonies so a ceremony that we often do is we say the Pledge of Allegiance then the next one is not was not listed in the order of business but it's a good thing to put on there just as a reminder to everyone that the approval of the agenda is a step that you need to do so I always like to state that we're going to approve the agenda and then you don't make assumptions that everyone is happy with how you're going to spend your time the next item is the reading an approval of the minutes and then usually you start with the reports of the officers starting with the chair and working your way down to the vice chair and then the treasurer and the secretary or any of the other officers have anything to say just so you know the report of a treasurer of treasure is considered a statement of fact and so it's not a report that has to be accepted by the assembly it's just a statement of fact so all of this business about I move to accept the report of the chair is really just not adding any value and as wasting people's time you have the reports of the special of the standard of the standing committees and then you have the reports of the special committees and then you go to unfinished business so the definition of unfinished business is things that have not been completed in previous meetings and then you go into new business and we'll talk about that you know there's a couple of slides just a few words on the reading of the minutes so if there are minutes from other meetings they are read and approved in the order with earliest so occasionally the secretary forgets to bring copies and forgets to this truth of the minutes in advance and so you skip that and you postpone that to the next meeting it's okay to do that but you still need to go through the process and so if you have prior meeting minutes you approve them in the order in which they they were generated Corrections two minutes it doesn't have to be a big deal it's usually handed by unanimous consent so if someone is making like a scriveners error or if the wrong person is noted as having made a motion usually people know those kinds of things and and if no one disagrees with it and that's considered unanimous consent but if there's object ins then you have to treat that like a subsidiary motion so if you recorded that something was passed on a vote of 51 to 49 when in reality it was 66 to 34 someone could say I have a correction of the minutes the vote was such-and-such and then someone else will need to say oh yeah that's right I second the motion and then you can debate it and then people have to draw up on their memories like was it 49 50 or was it 66 40 34 but ultimately you vote on that and and you you get a majority in agreement to what the minutes should say I just want to comment that he's right all of this stuff doesn't take very long if you guys get into the flow with it and just brush through it you know it's boring but it's essential imagine if Congress had actually been looking at its own minutes for the last 50 years yeah and you know if you're if you have a chair that you can trust then you know you can you can you can you can risk paying less attention to this stuff but you know 2016 was an eye-opener for many of us we realized that we cannot trust our leadership we have to watch them very carefully because they are often not representing us the people well and just just you know not to look at it like a bummer but that's what it means to participate in your democracy everybody is gonna screw up we're management it's our job to watch our employees you know we've just been on vacation too long so thank you for teaching us this stuff Larry so on the on the next slide there is no lemon Tate limitation on when prior minutes can be corrected so if you're sitting there and you're thumbing through your notebook of all your prior minutes that you you you carry with you to every meeting and you notice that from three meetings back something was miss represented you can during this period ask that they be corrected and treated just as we talked about either by unanimous consent or as a secondary motion and I for anyone who's acting as a secretary I highly recommend that you read Roberts rules on how minutes should be written we're gonna have a session on minutes writing and what should be included in what should be excluded coming up in the future so stay tuned for that but in brief you do not record the conversations and the babe that goes on between people on the floor no one really cares when the minutes are said and done what they do care about is what what motions were made what the wording was of the motions and how the motions were handled that's the kind of stuff that you need to research we had a biologic really in 2016 in the Democratic Party Oregon and depending on how you view the the intent we got as a value of view the intent we could not trace back through the minutes what had happened we showed up at the third quarter meeting and the minutes that were distributed we're not the minutes that were distributed in advance and the Secretary had not noted anything that had been changed and what they had added was something that required prior notice in a prior meeting and the only could ever remember that being noted in the prior meeting so where did you know the question was where did this come from and why is it there and did they basically follow a proper procedure in proposing a bylaw has no and that ended up screwing up the election for the DNC members that fall and we took a a long drawn-out floor fight to get things put back to where they should have been at a subsequent meeting so it's really important that the minutes correctly reflect what was the size of the meeting so just on the reports of officers if an officer makes a recommendation they should not that officer should not move its implementation so if I'm if I'm the chair and well cher shouldn't do that anyway so assume that the vice-chair was asked to do something like this investigate whether or not the book should be audited the chair or the vice-chair it would not be a pro for them to move that and ought to be taken what they should do and any of you have attended these meetings have heard this language they would say something like I would entertain a motion to have our books out of it and then someone from the floor from the assembly where all the power lies says okay I move that we audit our books and then someone else says I second it and then you can debate it and photos up or down but it's not appropriate for an officer to to move action on in the assembly committee reports are different though because a committee chair is in charge of a committee and the committee is more than is generally more than one person and so you have several people who have been working on something coming up with a recommendation and then the chair can then move whatever recommendations has come out of the committee so that's cool to do I hope that makes sense to anyone if you if that doesn't make sense please type it in the chat and John will rein me in go buy your book and read it but yeah I'll clarify if we need to the concept of unfinished business is sometimes called old business but it's not old business it it's either unfinished business that you hadn't completed or its new business so unfinished business refers to questions that have come up over from a previous meeting as a result of that meetings having adjourned without completing that order of business so it truly is unfinished business so you can you need to disposition motions so either they're voted down or their past or they're referred to a committee or they're amended but something happens to them if if they are still pending at the end of the meeting and there's an open open questions that need to be resolved then that goes into the category of unfinished business it's not that someone has been talking about a picnic at the previous meeting but it was not not entertained by the floor anything you can't call that unfinished business and try to drag it out of the background and and put it on the floor under that under that headache so new business is also an area you have to watch for so the last agenda item in stand in the sander burger business is called new business chairs who don't want to mess with the the you know with the the the interference of the membership sometimes leaves this agenda item off if they do you should amend the agenda at the beginning of the meeting saying point of order the new business is left off the agenda please add it and if if there is not a order of business defined in the bylaws that says otherwise this is a item that the specified in Robert's Rules order and they have to add that members can introduce new items of business or can move the take from the table any matter on the table so we've done this a couple of times with the State Central Committee where we get to new business and we make motions the reason why we do this is because we do not trust the leadership sometimes to to not deep-six what we're trying to do and so we wither new business and we've moved it and it has to be dispositioned chairs cannot prevent the making illegitimate motions or deprive members of the right to introduce legitimate business so the chairs role is to administer the meaning is not to make judgment calls on actions that are going on or or or laying there value system on the activities of the organization so taking up the business out of its proper order so agendas are adopted by a majority vote so you know you get to the that that point of the agenda where you could have the approval of the agenda it just takes a majority vote to approve it and that basically says a majority of the people in the room want to follow this order of business when the adoption of spending it is subject to amendment by majority vote so like I said if the chair does not want to put new business on and they're supposed to you can say I move that we add new business to the end of the agenda someone else should seconded and hopefully the majority will support you in the motion that you made and that would pass by a majority vote once the agenda has been adopted it takes a two-thirds vote to then deviate from it and the last point is very interesting because you often see this happen chant the chair cannot depart from the prescribed order of business which only the assembly can do by at least two-thirds vote the chair cannot say oh you know we're getting to the end of the meeting we're gonna skip this item and we're just going to go to the last item they cannot do that and there's ways of handling that you have to say point of order I call for the orders of the day which means you have to stick to the agenda and they have to do that and there's ways to handle chairs that do not execute their job properly and we will put we will lump that in with a topic of appealing for a ruling of the chair that's this is are all really cool you've got some great comments in the audience Larry and I want to mention something that um well a lot of people are saying this really should have been taught in schools why are we teaching this in our schools yes that's that's how you know we don't have a democracy anymore folks they don't want you to know this stuff Shultz e100 is saying how do those people know this he was talking about watching Senate the other day and something going I was like how how would you deal with that do our representatives like Ocasio if she you know she wins - does she have a responsibility to learn Robert's Rules or do those people know any of that crap for real well you often hear about certain senators who have specialized on the rules of the Senate and I think senator Byrd was one of those he knew the Senate rules forward and backwards and so yes and and it allows you to get things done because if you were following the rules people cannot cannot object we had a senator state senator from Vermont visiting us at the end of last year and we were talking about that and he said yeah one of the first things I did when I got elected to the Vermont legislature was I study the rules of water and I made myself an expert and I was able to get things through because I understood the rules on how things were handled we've often been astonished at committees inside the orion legislature where we know or at least a majority of the members of a committee have stated that they support something but that item was not moved out of the committee and i'm not read Mason's Rules of Order which is the what they are based on but you know one would hope that chairs of committees cannot over ride the will of a majority of the committee so if that is a rule that a majority of the committee can move something out of the committee onto the floor for a vote you have to know the procedures for doing that and this is exactly why we're setting up the statewide organization for studying this because there is no other way there it is very difficult to study this stuff on your own I'm finding that people who just read the book and and take that now it's cold without talking with people who understand the implications of Roberts rules and and the fundamental principles of parliamentary procedure often don't get it interpreted correctly and so it's we're finding and one of the values of attending the groups here in in Portland and while we hope the electronic group will be is a way for people to bring in issues that they face in their local organizations regardless of whatever party it belongs to or organization and discuss them and get and get a knowledge share of more experienced parliamentarians who are used to interpreting these things that's that's so absolutely beautiful in the audience's in agreement with you on needing to do this just some other comments Dennis German citizen says I had four years politics civics in school it's mandatory so uh schultzy when says can we explain whether we're not getting where we're being denied this in modern times never mind I know do we one other says and I'm guessing this is in reference to you know our Senate and reps and stuff they probably learned by doing after they get pissed and that's the I think that's the truth you know we can read the books but it's practice that's going to make us good at this stuff right powerful stuff I'm glad people are getting involved and we were we were talking with our with the winner of the primary for our district for the house last weekend and I was I was encouraging her to get baseless rules of order so she understands how this stuff is handled and her campaign manager assured us that the legislature takes all of their new members through a orientation session where all of us is trained I still would not trust them a hundred percent gives you imagine that you never get to object never raise your hand yes these are our rules and especially in the situations where you have the leadership and control the money that is used to reelect everyone's campaigns it's really a sordid mess and so it's it's gonna it takes legislators with a lot of strength and fortitude to stand up for their rights you