more Re: PAC Minutes: Dec 23, 1999

[Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>]

Reading more carefully R art 21, about the Motion to Adjourn,
I notice (p 233, numbered point 1) that a Motion to Adjourn
may be "qualified ..., as in the case of a motion to adjourn
at, or to, a future time".  (And a good thing, too, that you 
can't move to adjourn at a past time!)

If it is so qualified it's not a privileged motion, which
means that it cannot be made if there is any other
business pending (bottom of p 233).

So we did do a proper Motion to Adjourn, without 
having to amend formally a vanilla Motion to Adjourn.

And it sure seems like a good idea for committees to 
adopt a schedule of meetings and rules for changing
that schedule, because it would appear that if they did
so, a Motion to Adjourn would be privileged in any case,
and if a majority wants to adjourn while there's business
pending, I say, let 'em end the meeting rather than just 
leaving, thus leaving the meeting without a quorum.

Jon has anticipated this feature by making agreement
to the meeting schedule part of the committee setup 
process; cf R, p 232, lettered point a.  We might want to make 
note of this in whatever committee handbook we come up 
with (which has to be more than an epitome of R if we specify 
non-R rules), and check to be sure that Jon's suggested 
procedure for agreeing to the schedule is Right By Robert's 
when we come around to it again.

Finally, I've found that R has a distinct notion of what a
"session" is, and there are some things that are conditioned
on whether a session ends or continues.  "Session" is
defined on p 83, first bulleted point; I haven't made any
notes on what is conditioned on its termination.

regards, Terry