next term discussion
jos...@gmail.com
Continuing the discussion from our last exec...
The origin of my frustration is our performance assessment as a team, over the last six months. It's not too good.
Our top priority is membership growth. (I think we're in agreement on this) Second is preparing for the election.
Membership
We had a number of leads, yet we closed zero new memberships, and only upgraded share progress. Our last new member closure was in august, prior to the new term of the current officers.
In this term, I brought in some leads, and so did others. At least one of those leads was a second bite at the apple, after we apparently dropped the ball the first time. We should be tracking the progress, issues/obstacles, mitigations, and next steps regularly on our exec calls. I'm not really a huge fan of grandiose tracker spreadsheets, as they end up being more work to manage than whatever it is actually tracking. However, we should at least have a bullet list in our exec notes of the active ones so they stay top of mind and we allocate time to review them in every meeting.
This is the primary responsibility of the VP of membership. Brady is seeking to vacate this role, and move into a different role with more responsibility and power, without even finding a successor and thus leaving the most important role unstaffed.
This role definitely needs to be a woman, and it's more important than having a vice chair.
Officer Elections
The election did not jump out from the forest into the middle of the road and suprise us. We had months to do outreach and develop new people into officers. Instead, we didn't have any any substantive discussion on it until January 9, in a time crunched block at the end of our exec meeting. Our outreach consisted of an email on january 16th.
How did we spend our limited time over the last few months?
We consumed most of our time working on an FAQ, and a review of the governance document. In both cases this was editorial in nature and was not aligned with our priorities. While these do have value, they were not urgent, and as a result they starved our top priorities from action.
My View on Next Steps
If we are going to make any changes to the officers in the coming cycle, our first priority should be ensure we have a dedicated membership officer, that needs to be a woman, and it really shouldn't be a brand new officer.
We shouldn't get wrapped around the axle regarding Sonya's family leave later in the year. There are a number of ways we can deal with that. We can elect a chair pro tem, have another officer serve as acting chair, we could also treat tech differently have have people rotate each week to chair the meetings. It also may run into our recess, which makes things easier as well.
Frankly, IMHO I think we should just stay the same and if we're going to leave any position unfilled, it should be the vice chair. We really don't need officer standing by in case Sonya gets hit by a bus or goes on leave.
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Brady Kriss
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Sonya
I have a family emergency that might prohibit me from running the call on Wednesday so would really appreciate if someone could step in and cover this week.
jos...@gmail.com
Brady,
I’m sorry things didn’t work out. I thank you for having Dan stay on to address the tech side, as well as your contributions so far.
My point, perhaps worded poorly, was that regardless of if we are using a spreadsheet or bullets, we’re not tracking the hot leads and moving them to closure. That status tracking isn’t something I could find in the spreadsheet. Another factor, which is on all of us, is that we weren’t prioritizing our meeting time to ensure that we were giving priorities like that sufficient time. (I made a related point about timeboxing in the agenda on the tech call)
I hope you’d agree that in the current state, having a drumbeat of members joining shows enthusiasm and can attract others. The same is true on the tech side, which RagTag has been helping as well.
I just felt that we needed to have a plan for how we would address this as we move forward, and the election cycle was a good time to raise it.
Sonya,
If Tim can’t cover this running the tech call this week, I will handle it. As for your longer term point, I’m disappointed as well.
jos...@gmail.com
Adding to my last mail, to be explicit.
What I would ask is if you both might reconsider, and see if we can work out a compromise where we have explicit coverage on the tracking issue I raised.
If my mail was too aggressive, I apologize, it’s not personal. this whole situation has been extremely upsetting and stressful, and maybe I took it out on those around me.
