My two cents...please read if you have a minute

[William James Eden]

Hi everyone,

I'm glad to hear we had a productive call last week. There are just a few
things I wanted to talk about.

I know I'm not in a great position to criticize because I haven't been
around, and I definitely don't mean to single anyone out. Since our
organization is just getting off the ground, there are a few things that
are still pretty ambiguous about how it works.

I agree that the lobby day needed to be postponed, but I feel the way we
handeled cancelling it was inappropriate.

NYSSC is a concensus based group, and we really need everyone's input if
what we're doing is going to work out. Something as big as this, a
complete change in strategy, is a decission the steering committee isn't
even in a position to make without consulting the whole group. The lobby
committee could reconmend doing so, but even if everyone in the committee
agreed, that kind of decision isn't ours to make alone. The fact that
there were only three people on the conference call (myself being one of
those who missed it) and that no minutes were sent out or e-mail
discussion followed, is an even worse sign. There should, I think, be
fairly comprehensive minutes sent out within two days (at most) of every
call.

I'm not saying it was a bad decission, I definitely think postponing our
lobby day until we are stronger is a good idea, and I know sometimes we
need to make judgement calls that an outsider (me) might judge as rash in
retrospect. But when we're building an organization with this many
students, we need everyone to be involved, and this means including
everyone in our major decisions and following the proper procedures. We
need to be very careful that we don't appear to have a small circle of
"insiders" making decisions for the whole group.

I haven't heard back from anyone after my last e-mail, so I'm going to
schedule a call for monday night. I'll send you an e-mail in a few
minutes. Please get back to me to let me know if you can make it, and if
not enough people can, we'll cancel it.

Thanks guys, talk to you soon.

Fil

[rj...@cornell.edu]

I was on that conference call, and I'm confused regarding how
canceling the lobby day a definite decision so quickly. I think it
should have been canceled, but I thought we would at least discuss
with the steering committee first. Sorry if I implied otherwise
during the call. I'll be on the call Monday. I didn't say anything
regarding it earlier because only objecting if there's a problem is
different from an RSVP.

Robert