LibraryTechtonics

I don’t read much about the officialy member business at ALA. Perhaps I’m not reading the right blogs or sites, but it just doesn’t seem to come up in my daily reading, or even in the conference blogging bits.

Jessamyn convinced me to go to the ALA Membership I meeting on Friday, right before the Barack Obama speech. Overall, it really was quite interesting. Robert’s Rules of Order Sturgis Rules of Order* were in full effect at this meeting (as far as I could tell), and Carol Brey-Casiano was very, very effective in moderating the meeting; you could just tell she was a leader, and very much in charge.

The big thing seemed to be that the meeting would be under quorum (which I think is less than 80 members is 75 members in attendance*), so that “work could really get done”. I’m not certain what happens when there are more than 80 members in attendance, but at this meeting everything was going to a raised-hand majority vote.

What I didn’t get were the proposals on the table: encouraging (not telling, or enacting) divisions to lower the retired member rates, and encouraging the withdrawl of troops in Iraq in order to free up funding that could eventually go to libraries. Now, I’m not saying that these weren’t important or valid proposals, only that our profession seems to have so many other issues that need to be addressed that would more directly, and expediently, affect librarians and really get things done.

All the same, the meeting was well run by the moderator as well as the attendees. Everything was in order, people really tried to move things along. Proposals appeared on large screens at the front of the room, and changes were added on the fly and shown to everyone, which I thought was a rather simple and nifty use of technology that made governance more efficient. I was quite impressed. However, I do wonder what a bad membership meeting looks like, and how often they happen, since bad meetings are where you see the real flavor of an organization.

I may try to get to more of these meetings in future, to learn more about an organization I am admittedly mostly unfamiliar with.

Tags: conference
|  Print This Post |

Both comments and pings are currently closed.