Re: Thanksgiving, for example

[Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>]

Robin wrote:
| > That won't scale (wastes enormous amounts of time and requires the
| > attendance of a parliamentarian to get reasonable rules set up), so 
| > we'll have to consider that point later on.
| 
| I think it could scale, and it should work better than prescribing
| a fixed (often overly-complex) parliamentary procedure governing
| (recursive) committees.  If a subcommittee has no real power except
| as informal input into its parent (sub)committee process, then nothing
| is risked, seems to me, in allowing each subcommittee to set up
| rules that match the problem space and operational constraints,
| as agreed upon by the subcommittee members, per some default (**
| very loose**) set of procedures, which the subcomittee is free to
| override.

What I had in mind was the initial 2 1/2 day meeting of the Rosetta Net
Implementation Framework group.  We spent at least two hours on establishing
our rules, and it's only because I'd observed Jon at work in the past that
I was able to help Pat O'Sullivan find some problems which, had we not
uncovered them, might have produced headaches later.

That said, it might be worthwhile establishing a short list of items
wrt which a committee could customize itself, with explicit multiple 
choice answers.  But if every committee can do things slightly 
differently, anyone serving on more than one of them ...

regards, Terry