SCN General Meetings

[Kurt Cockrum]

References: <Pine.3.89.9601251112.B19858-0100000 at scn>,
	<Pine.3.89.9601270008.A14057-0100000 at scn>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9601290020.D1092-0100000 at scn>,
	<Pine.3.89.9601290044.G1092-0100000 at scn>,
	<199601291631.IAA04177 at scn.org>

	
Kevin said:
>	I think Jim has an excellent suggestion in developing printed 
>material to cover the history of SCN/CPSR/SCNA, etc.  If we spend ten 
>minutes per meeting on it, that adds up to more than 1 entire meeting in 
>the course of a year.  

but then he said:
>The meetings are scheduled from now till October (7-8:45). I will try to 
>get them moved up to 6:30, that is a good idea and a way to make them 
>friendly to new users and do any pre-meeting business that may need to be 
>done.

Ken Applegate said:
>I should point out that it is fairly hard to get recycled from the
>workday and back to a meeting by 7 PM. I think 6:30 PM might be 
>inconvenient for a lot of people.

Yes, we wind up losing more than 2 entire meetings in the course
of a year.  Moreover, the time-slot is growing in the wrong direction; it
collides with the tail of the rush-hour time-slot.  I don't know about you,
but after a day of duking it out in the outside world, I want a little
unwind-time before I dive back in.  Scheduling a meeting for 6:30 amounts
to extending the work-hours for that day to around 16 hours or so.
Any new user with the same problem will not regard the arrangement as
"user-friendly".

Now Jim has a pretty good idea, namely the little handout sheets.
There could just be piles of them at the meeting, whose time need
not change.  In fact the sheets are time-savers.  People can take `em
home and read them at their leisure.  Making time available at the meeting
site to distribute them is counter-productive.  In fact, just to be
clear about it, up at the top of Jim's sheets should appear in big letters,
"FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT SCN part X", in about 30-point
attention-getting type, followed by the phrase in smaller type
"Please READ this before asking questions at the meeting.  Please *only*
ask questions at the neeting *not* answered by this sheet".  No logo,
no grafix, no hype, just type.

The point is not to *stroke* the new user a la a bogus "user-friendliness"
that presumably makes them "feel good" (as if we knew!) but to *deliver*
information to the user, to answer their questions, quite a different
thing.  If the info-delivery aspect is the operational definition
of "user-friendliness", then I have no beef with that.  If, after having
the relevant questions answered by the FAQ, the user decides to move on
(maybe after not getting the strokes they expected), I have no problem
with that, either.

As far as "pre-meeting" business goes, what is that?  Isn't the meeting's
purpose to *do* the business, not just a forum to report the results of,
or the endpoint of, or the object-of-preparation-for, whatever "pre-meeting"
business there was?  Especially, "pre-meeting" should not be a code-word
for "failure to do home-work" or "last-minute preparations for agenda
achievement".  I hope we don't stop monitoring our *process*; it can get
out of hand if we do.  So the quivers on my antennae inform me :)

Now shortening the workday is presumably one of the desirable social goals
I hear people talking about, but what I'm hearing on this forum appears
to have a result that amounts to the exact opposite.  How come?

Why is it, in our efforts to create useful social change, and to try to
make a difference in this crummy world for the better, do we always wind
making it a little tougher for ourselves when the thing we are working
for turns into its opposite and bites us in our butt?  I wish we could
get a handle on that mysterious transformation...it seems downright
intractable.  In fact, it's the dark side of working for positive social
change.  We keep replicating what we want to change.

-- kurt
	If Pat Robertson and Rex Reed are the Kevin Mitnicks of religion,
	who is the Tsutomu Shimomura of religion?
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