[Ambassadors] FAMNA Meetings - Follow Guidelines

[inode0]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 10:21 PM, Clint Savage <herlo1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll admit this right out of the gate.  I'm causing more havoc than I
> should in meetings because I'm not following the meeting guidelines at
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/IRCHowTo#Protocol.

Not following these guidelines may or may not cause havoc, I don't
find our meetings to be filled with havoc at present. They seem to run
fairly smoothly although long.

> I want to point this out because I want to do better.  Some of the
> ambassadors do a great job of following the guidelines and I want to
> encourage us all to use these guidelines in next week's meeting.

Following guidelines and formalities is great if it facilitates a more
effective meeting, otherwise they are cumbersome and frankly
disruptive. For a meeting with 5 or 6 people I think they tend to just
be an annoyance. For a meeting with 20 people they are much more
important to the meeting running smoothly.

> I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trying to enforce rules, for one, I
> have no authority to do so.  These guidelines work well for other
> meetings in which I've participated and I think our meetings will be
> more focused if we follow them.

Our meeting can have more focus if the moderator keeps things moving
in a directed way. Since most of us helping out with moderation are
new to that role at meetings I think if we prepared ourselves a bit
better prior to the meeting that would help too.

> As such, I plan to start using them immediately for any meeting I am a
> part.  I hope others will follow my lead.  Again, I apologize for not
> doing a better job up front.

I'll have to think about whether I want to do this, for meetings with
a small number of participants I don't think it is necessary and gets
in the way of communication. My natural inclination is to err on the
side of informality until there is a problem with that approach.

John