Fix things Friday (er, Saturday)

[luzula]

At this point I should just rename the meme to the Saturday meme instead...

Anyway, in the last two weeks I have:
- Worked on recruiting people for elected positions in the union. There's one person who I'm really hoping will say yes to being on the board...*crosses fingers*
- Nagged at people to sign various union meeting minutes.
- Wrote and sent out monthly email newsletter for the union.
- Organized annual meeting for university branch of union except that due to sickness and various other things we were too few for a quorum. Made Doodle to find other time.
- Given feedback on various texts for my environmental org.
- Eeemailed about various things.

It looks like this list is shorter than usual, but as always there are lots of things that seem too small to put on it, which are lumped into the email category.

Also, I have now learned the word "quorum"! I felt vaguely that it was maybe the word I needed, and lo, it was.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I was delighted to learn that every organization establishes its own quorum. Some require "super majorities," such as 60% +1, while some require simple majorities, and some of the city committees I was on required so many citizen members and so many elected officials.

Has Roberts Rules of Order made its way into your experience? If not, congrats.

[luzula]

Nope, no Robert's Rules of Order. I recognize the name, but in Sweden we have our own tradition of how meetings work. It does differ a little between organizations, but overall there's a continuity.

Nature and Youth Sweden where I used to be active has a lot of great meeting techniques. One I really like is that when someone is saying something with which you agree, you shake your hands by rotating your wrists. That way you don't disturb anyone with noise and you don't have to take up time by raising your hand and saying you agree.

...and an internet search reveals that people in other countries use that signal too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Hand_signals

Interesting. There seems to be no other overlap in hand signals compared to that post, though, just that one (we have other ones as well). We call the hand-shaking one "hattifnatt" after creatures in Tove Jansson's Moomin books.

ETA: to clarify: I've never used consensus decision-making, like in that link, it's just the hand-signal that was the same.

[jesse_the_k]

Those hand signals are a brilliant idea!

If I understand you correctly "rotating hands" gesture is "applause" in ASL (and given US dominance, has spread to other national sign languages as well).

https://youtu.be/Wi8jk-lxTHg

I'd interpret this as "How do deaf people clap? Not like hearing people. Instead they use this gesture. Why? It's visible. Since deaf people can't hear the sound of hands clapping, they use the 'applause' sign instead."

Robert's Rules are evil, in my opinion. The better you know the rules, the more you can control meetings, and that often means preventing debate or modification of proposals.

I could babble for hours about decision making processes. I worked with three others at Martha's, my living coop, to make a modified consensus system we called "Martha's Rules of Order." Looking at the wiki article, I can see we weren't alone.

[luzula]

Oh, it's from ASL, I didn't know that! Cool. Will ask if it's the same in the sign language used in Sweden.

Decision making processes could be a subject of some future Skype talk. : )

[jesse_the_k]

yes!