On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:50 PM, AndrewRT <andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote: [...] If the situation requires frequent and long board meetings, that is what must be done. However, once everything is up and running one can hope that board meetings may be less frequent and shorter. Still, if they are required to meet more often then though be it. I wouldn't like to see the board limit it's meetings to a certain frequency and duration out of convenience and then leave things open for discussion until the next meeting. Anybody standing for a board should be aware of that. That is true! I hope that such measures don't have to be taken to encourage to stand for the board of an organisation and that the level of commitment needed is known in advance. It's ashame when an organisation has sufficient members, but not enough who are willing to commit to standing for the board. I am currently not (yet!) a member of the UK chapter, mainly due to geographic location and time in sorting out the paper work. From past experience in working and organising in other non-profit organisations I can say that often there are enough members who would be willing to stand, but many don't put themselves forward for such a position themselves and need to be asked. I'm not too sure why this is, but maybe the existing board members could contact and talk to a few potential candidates. Ian

2009/4/1 AndrewRT <andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com>om>: I think 2 hours a month is unduely optimistic. We should certainly be able to reduce the amount of time spent in meetings, but not that much. At the momemt we have around 15 hours a month of meetings, cutting that down to 2 seems very unlikely to me. I think monthly meetings, with emergency meetings when necessary, is a good idea, but we have to accept that those monthly meetings are likely to be quite long (although hopefully not as long as some of the past meetings!). I think some face-to-face meetings would also be good, since you can cover quite a lot more by getting together for a day. I believe there was some support for 2 face-to-face meetings a year (one at the AGM and one other) - depending on the geographical distribution of the board we may even be able to increase that. I think we need some greater dedication from board members during online meetings. At the moment members are often doing other things during a meeting, which slows everything down. That's understandable when meetings are so frequent, you can't dedicate an entire evening to just the meeting, but if we make them monthly hopefully people can pay attention more. When I was chairing the meeting last night I found I had a great deal of difficulty knowing when to move on to the next item - I'd ask if anyone else had any more comments, but I didn't know how long to wait for responses. I often tried to move on only to discover that somebody had been typing another comment. In a face-to-face meeting, the chair would go round the room making eye contact with people and would know if they wanted to say something, but that isn't possible on IRC. We need to work on that. Perhaps simply moving to something like Skype, which tells you when people are typing, would help.