= Debrief on the 2013 Membership Meeting = These are combined notes from the 2013-10-24 and 2013-11-07 staff meeting calls. Everyone who attended the meeting is free to add comments. * Erq: we had 11 participants. Very meaningful - we had people who wanted to participate in all three mesa discussions, but in the end had only movement and democracy - nobody in infrastructure. Interpretation - people felt infrastructure was well taken care so focused on the other mesas. * Jamie: Erq and I discussed the mesa pre-phone call. I didn't think they produced the full range of discussion possible. I thought the mesa breakouts worked really well. On the whole, we had terrible outreach. This needs to be rectified next year, and attendance was poor. A second area of improvement is technology, the level of technical failures and the delays it caused exceeded what we can fully accomplish. In the future we should focus on one channel between MX and US is primary. Having to change the setup in the middle of the meeting was less than ideal. Still we did accomplish quite a bit and this is evidence of the hard work we put into it. * Dana: Last year was my first. I still think members are not sure why they are invited to meeting - so surveys and polls and getting people more involved would be better. Regarding tech - we can't expect people to sit through waiting for tech to be fixed. Lots of good ideas in the conversations. It was good in general. * Ross: If we are going to have remote participation - we can't have the delays that we had. That's a matter of better planning. In MF/PL fashion we did our planning on the spot - and that's the result that we get. We need to plan out how the tech is ''not'' going to work - we should lead with that question. What is our alternative when everything fails. We should plan to have a conversation with the people connected - even if we can't connect with Mexico. I agree - we still don't have the investment of the membership as the membership. I think that is evidenced by the proposals put forward. This LC has to focus on what membership is. We need to develop the relationships to bring people to the next meeting. One point of tension - my votes weren't counted :(. They were entered by hand instead of on paper. Also - question of whether no vote should be a 0 vote? The LC should be asked to sort these details out. That said - it was great to discuss infrastructure meeting with Jay [Portside member who is not a professional technical person]. It was very meaningful. It would have been better with four more members. To that degree it was quite successful. * Erq: Last year we had reactions to our reports. Reactions came from Rasha and Carlos Fazio in both locations. There was a meaningful dialogue. It would be important to have that feedback for next year. * Enrique: good debate, tech discussion mesa chose to focus on other two mesas, reflection of good work being done on support. Very complex infrastructure, difficult to put to work. Next time: simpler is better. Setup day before would be better. All our members in Mexico joined in putting computers together. Also, shows that we are lacking in techies in this event. We discussed financial report in detail. Good to have acceptance of proposal to build coop. We missed opportunity to get feedback from reports that we made (last year we got feedback from Rasha and Carlos Fazio). We had members come due to effort of calling them. * Alfredo: shows some strengths of mf/pl. Most important meeting because it gives our LC (strongest to date) the ability to make changes to deal with extreme problems. 18 people showed up, mostly techies - problem of membership consciousness. Turn out was among our poorest to date. We have tech problems. Some tendencies are to limit growth, i think we should instead grow the membership. Quality of discussion was high, mesas went well. While least populated, most sucessful because we have all the elements in place. * Hilary: Trying to follow along with the info from the mesas... hard to follow along, lots of text. Trying to distill down discussion into distinct sentences was tough. We need to think about that process - could leave voting open to people not at the meeting. Membership consciousness is key - we more public this year + smaller turnout - something went wrong. Outreach alone is not enough to build that consciousness. 10 out of 15 LC elected members were there - still there is 5 that didn't show up. The LC has to know that outreach and attendance at the meeting is part of that responsility. Still confused by how to carry out some proposals. * Jamie: The reason I didn't think the phone meetings were successful was because it's difficult to have a deep discussion with people you don't know. People seemed reluctant to disagree. It seemed that people thought there were actually 4 meetings instead of one. * Erq: I think we could eventually improve if we consider for the next time. If we build a report from the mesas and pick the main aspects of the debate for the final meeting. * Hilary: we didn't even refer to the phone meeting at the f2f - useful but didn't carry through * Ross: we should totally re-think our approach. It should be a two day event, part should be traininig, or training orientation, part dealing with membership questions. Not enough sense of it being meaningful to show up. * Hilary: we could have panel sessions organized by members * Dana: we are just throwing info out are members. Engaging them over longer period of time. * Erq: I agree with Dana - we are lacking sense of community. We have to start by knowing each other's project. * Jamie: start phone calls eariler * Analia: should we incorporate these ideas into the idea of our monthly talks