Agenda for the Sunday, October 17, 2010 Grex Board Meeting
 6:30-8:30 p.m. EDT, Zingerman's Next Door, upstairs
 
  1. Call to Order 
  2. Business
     a. Upcoming Election Planning
     b. Status of By-Law Amendment Items
     b. Town Hall Cf Item & Planning, continued 
     c. Discussed But Not Decided
  3. Schedule Next Meeting 
  4. Adjourn

26 responses total.

Please enter the Treasurer's Report and Staff Report in this item.  If
there are significant issues in either report that need to be discussed
at the meeting, let me know and I'll add them to the agenda.

Other general items for an agenda:

Roll call, introduction of guests, approval of previous minutes, special
orders (stuff required at this meeting, or postponed from a previous meeting),
and, near the end, announcements. 

Approval of minutes (or corrections to them) occurs in the the coop cf.
The Discussed but not Decided business item is for items postponed at
previous meetings.  We do an informal roll call at the beginning of the
meeting to determine if we have a quorum.  Attendees are listed in the
minutes.

I'd like to keep us focused on the business we need to discuss first,
then we can entertain bureaucratic items if there's time.  

Robert's Rules of Order aren't bureaucratic. :)

They just aren't needed to keep us on task and polite to one another.

We don't usually follow Robert's Rules of Order.  But having a long
list of items with little value other than putting something in the
minutes that are already there sounds bureaucratic to me.  Let's
fill out this form...

Kent, you know we don't use Robert's Rules of Order, I know that we
don't, and Rane knows that we don't.  But he likes to remind us that he
thinks we should use them.

...which does nothing to make them less bureaucratic, IMO.

They help prevent oversights. In any case, if they are done, they should 
appear in the agenda, as otherwise the agenda in inaccurate. Approval of 
minutes, by the way, is recommended legally - and it must be done by the 
board in-session. The minutes do not stand as a record of a meeting 
until they are approved (and Grex IS a Michigan 501(c)3 non-profit).

Grex is different.  I'm okay with that.

Okay, we can approve the previous meeting minutes.  I don't want us
getting side-tracked on things like that, though.  We have a hard
enough time sticking to an agenda as is. 

(That might be because of disdain for RRoO.) A good chairperson can keep a
meeting on the agenda. 

And a good board member will never be a problem in sticking to time
and staying on the agenda.   
 
As you can see we have no updates on the treasurer's status or the
staff's status, so we are without that information.  Apparently,
very few board members read this item.  

Re #12: that would be nice, but in the event they don't (and I think you 
would admit is not uncommon), it is a responsibility of the chair to 
correct the problem.

Grex has its own culture.  It may not be what you expect, Rane, but
that's the way it is.  If you don't like it, run for the Board and
try to change it.

Staff report:  Grex has been up and apparently stable since the last
Board meeting.  There has been a discussion of apparently unused SSH
connections in the Grex Systems Problem item of Agora, but no action
seems to have been required.

Like the book says, "All quiet on the Western Front."

Thanks, Joe.  That will save us some time at the meeting.  

Personally, I'd like an abbreviated Treasurer's Report:  How many
members do we have?  How many have joined since the last BoD meeting? 
Did enough members endorse the proposals?  I'm not so concerned with how
much we have in the bank and how much we've spent: those numbers
probably haven't changed significantly in the past three weeks.

I agree, Joe.  Status reports should be short and concise and not
an invitation to a long discussion.  A membership report is something
I've wanted for a long time.

Hopefully we'll be able to get a membership report at this evening's 
meeting.

I was hoping TS would pipe up before then. :/

 
oops .... 
  

Re #14: I tried that, but I was outnumbered.

It may be easier in the near future.  You never know.  We do have
Board elections coming up soon, with the nominating period to end
November 15.  The elections occur Dec 1-15.  

  
.. adn fewwer than a doxzen voters ... so far, but we are close tio that ##.
  

  
we ahve 10.

  
we have 12 ...

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