If an At-Large or committee jabber room would be helpful, I can certainly get one setup for us to use. On 13 Jun 2007, at 15:22, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
Jacqueline A. Morris ha scritto:
Interruptions are also a problem – it was brought to my attention that yesterday I interrupted Izumi, (sorry Izumi) but I didn’t hear him speaking and thought he had finished. On the other hand, there was a 6 person at one time discussion for a little while about Wendy’s travel issue before I managed to break it up. Is there any way for us to do the in person “hand raise” to indicate that we want to speak - on a teleconference?
The Board has a jabber room so that people can IM Vint to ask for the floor while the call it's running. It doesn't work for me (because, unless I use Skype, my fixed line is so poor that it drops the DSL connection when making voice calls) but it's a nice idea if many people are connected while calling.
For the rest, what I discovered when chairing is that it is useful to identify in advance which agenda items require a decision, and which do not. Those that do not, should have a preallocated time (as short as possible) and the discussion should be ruthlessly closed when it expires. Those that do, should have motions already on the table so that, when the preallocated time expires, a vote is called. If the agenda is published in advance, people have time to object and sort out procedural and drafting issues with any proposed issues in advance.
OTOH, we've always had a problem in that we have too many things that we need to discuss. Reducing too much the number of topics per call is impossible - we would quickly build a backlog of leftover items, which in the end would clutter our physical meetings even more. But what we could do is to be as selective as possible as to what really needs discussion in a collective meeting; everything which is not a Committee decision item should be deferred to the Chair and staff or to volunteers.
Finally, we should not revisit decisions and topics again and again. I can't remember how many times we have reopened discussions on the rules of procedure - I think that this is the fourth or fifth one... From the outside, sometimes it looks like we are unable to conduct our business and make good use not just of our own voluntary time, but of the human and monetary resources that are allocated to us by ICANN. -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------
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