[wplug-board] Todays meeting: the good, the bad, and the ugly

[Patrick Wagstrom]

Taking a hint from my GStreamer friends, here's my take on today's
meeting:

Good Stuff:
Hey, we had a meeting!  This is good.  We created a PR committee.
People got to see what was being done.  I think there was some real
excitement.

I think that the body of WPLUG was pretty happy with what we've been
doing.

Bad Stuff:
People are not so big on the whole hand raising thing.  A lot of the
issues that people were bringing up in the meeting should just be
addressed to committee and not needed in the meeting.  Is this a problem
with getting the word out to other folks about how to communicate?
Maybe we should have an open time sometime in the meeting.  Anyway,
reports generally are NOT the time for new ideas.

Reports for committees and officers - we should look at having these
written down so we don't need to skip back between people.   It makes
the meeting flow better.  If we could also project the meeting agenda on
the projector that would be awesome.  Let's people know what's coming
up.

Make sure we have a copy of the minutes available for the next meeting.
Paper works too.  

We need to resolve the issue of who counts toward quorum.  I would
suggest that new people NOT count toward quorum.  Reason: if someone
really wanted to screw with WPLUG, they could show up with a few friends
who were members  and a bunch of hired guns they paid $5 to let become
members.  They could do it in one meeting that we would otherwise not
have quorum.  This way it takes them two meetings.

In the future we (the board) should probably all sit together or
something.  It creates a uniform presentation and says we mean business.

The Ugly:
We started WAY too late.  We need to make it to these things on time.
If you thought it was hard getting 15 people there for quorum at 10:30,
wait until next time when they think "They started at 11:15 last
time...".  In these cases it is rarely the best thing to set an end
point for the meeting because that automatically de-prioritizes stuff
further down on the agenda just because it was further down.  This
really annoyed me today.

Getting enough members to show up was painful.  In the future we should
be calling people at 10am, not at 10:45am.  While that sort of stuff
used to work in college for student government meetings, very few people
live 10 minutes away from CMU.

Lots of stuff to talk about on April 12.  Great work everyone, I think
we showed that WPLUG is growing to be a vital, member driven
organization.  I'm stoked.

Rock over London, Rock on Chicago!

--Patrick