volunteer work

[HeresTomWithTheWeather]

the good news:

bunny, rich and i were able to coordinate a time to meet on saturday to go over the wordpress initiative.  for the short term goal of switching the main page to wordpress, bunny suggested the selecta theme.  she also presented some designs which are mostlly for longer term goals. generally, i thought the designs are really good.

the bad news:

coincidentally at the meeting, bunny made the point that volunteers need to be careful about what organizations they volunteer for.

as a volunteer, i have a limited amount of time to participate in constructive work for ATEN like last saturday's meeting. unfortunately, over the last year and this past week has been no exception, ATEN has been wasting a lot of my time.  All of this wasted time has been related to the behavior of a person who is no longer on the board by unanimous vote according to the august minutes that amanda posted to the site. to be clear, i have never been on the board.  my understanding is that the minutes were carefully worded and an agreement was made among the board members.

however, since the minutes were posted, a statement was made that violated that agreement. it was retracted after recognized by the board and then later the agreement was violated again.  after the second violation, the other board members expressed their concern to the offending board member and suggested a mitigation action since it was clear that the original agreement could not be enforced.  the board member that violated the agreement simply replied that the next meeting date was no good.  after further communication, the board member asked me to suggest a time to talk. i did so with the requirement that the conversation be on the record but that time has now passed and i have received no further communication from the board member.

as you can imagine, i'm sick of my time being wasted and have no intention to contribute to an organization where agreements made cannot be kept.

i'm still waiting for that board member to reply to me.

cheers,
tom

[HeresTomWithTheWeather]

first, i would like to apologize for taking so long to update this thread.  this update will not go into detail but i'll be glad to answer any questions. a few days after my previous post,i had a conversation with the board member and we came to an agreement on a plan of action.  on monday morning, with my assistance, the board attempted to execute that plan but it became problematic.  however, we worked together to come up with a more resilient plan and consensus was reached and that new plan will be executed.

to the extent that errors were made, they were a consequence of circumstances and tools available to the board.  through this experience, i've realized it is important as volunteers for us to provide the tools to the community so that we don't repeat these errors.  in this case, the circumstances included that the organization is not a legal entity and the error was confusion and we can resist that with transparency and avoiding ambiguity in communication.

in addition to the steps that the board is taking to fix the ambiguity of recent communication, i recommend that board members are identified on the public facing part of the website (conventionally under about) as soon as possible. similarly, meeting minutes should be similarly easy to find.  one way we can do that immediately is to put links to them in the member agreement page that is configured in the admin interface.

again, let me know if you have any questions. i will try to attend the volunteer meeting that is scheduled on sunday.

cheers,
tom

[Amanda Jones]

Thanks for update, Tom.  Oops, there is a volunteer meeting on Sunday? Is it a particular committee? 

--
http://amandahbjones.wordpress.com
http://austintimeexchange.org

[Tom Brown]

my understanding is that there is a 2pm meeting for south austin volunteers. i'm not aware of any committees.

cheers,
tom

[Amanda Jones]

That is actually an Orientation / South Austin round-up -- intended to develop the South Austin ATEN community.

[Tom Brown]

thanks. do you have any feedback regarding my recommendations about listing the board members in the about tab and a list of meeting minutes in a central place (the member agreement page for now)? both of these seem long overdue as many members have asked for this.

-tom

[Amanda Jones]

The Board in the About section is something that is already in the works, I believe.  (Rich, is that right?)
Minutes being accessible somewhere is important, as is the bylaws and handbook, I believe.  I'm also getting ready to write up a more extensive "member agreement", because I think people ought to agree to our policies when joining (and there is more than just "no spam").  So... maybe there is a more logical place for the minutes? Or maybe not...

-amanda

[HeresTomWithTheWeather]

this is a notice to the others on the dev list that i gave rich a backup of the site tonight and i'm no longer contributing to ATEN.  amanda posted the ridiculously sparse dec. 6 minutes on the ATEN site today and the board did not follow through with the board's 11/16 agreement to make a short note in the minutes to resolve the ambiguity in the prior minutes.

the board knows very well that the minutes should have been posted by dec. 13 according to the agreement made in the january 2011 minutes.  the reason the january 2011 minutes begin with the requirement that the minutes are to be posted after one week regardless of approval is to address the contingency that occurred from late september 2010 to january 2011 when karen disrupted board activity for 4 months by refusing to approve the minutes.

i apologize that i haven't replied to any of the queries on this list but i've been waiting to see if the board would follow through with their commitment and they didn't. i'll follow up tomorrow.

-tom