We had a chat at the Board meeting last night and there was a bit of nervousness at the fewness of people who have expressed an interest in standing for the Board. The applications are going straight to the tellers so the current Board members won't actually know who's applied until they're anounced in about a week's time (so that they dont get an unfair advantage over other candidates) but from discussions it looked like only two of the five interim Board members have applied and the other three are looking to retire; two non-Board members are also interested in applying and we don't know of anyone else who has come forward.
One aspect which might be putting people off is the frequency and length of the Board meetings we've been having to date. The initial Board has met 23 times so far (nearly once per week on average) often for 3 hours or more. Whilst this is probably necessary when we're getting things sorted out, I'd like to suggest that the next board has shorter and less frequent meetings. I think meeting once per month for no more than 2 hours would be ideal, so that it's not too much of a burdon on Board members and we avoid burning our volunteers out. At the same time we can change the Board into more of an "oversight" role, and do more "organising" work outside.
It's surprising what you can acheive when working to a strict deadline, and our productivity does tend to dive after a couple of hours.
Hopefully this will also encourage people who are thinking of putting their names forward but are put off by the commitment of meetings.
What do others think?
On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:50 PM, AndrewRT andrewrturvey@googlemail.comwrote: [...]
One aspect which might be putting people off is the frequency and length of the Board meetings we've been having to date. The initial Board has met 23 times so far (nearly once per week on average) often for 3 hours or more. Whilst this is probably necessary when we're getting things sorted out, I'd like to suggest that the next board has shorter and less frequent meetings. I think meeting once per month for no more than 2 hours would be ideal, so that it's not too much of a burdon on Board members and we avoid burning our volunteers out. At the same time we can change the Board into more of an "oversight" role, and do more "organising" work outside.
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.
It's surprising what you can acheive when working to a strict deadline, and our productivity does tend to dive after a couple of hours.
That is true!
Hopefully this will also encourage people who are thinking of putting their names forward but are put off by the commitment of meetings.
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.
What do others think?
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@googlemail.com:
One aspect which might be putting people off is the frequency and length of the Board meetings we've been having to date. The initial Board has met 23 times so far (nearly once per week on average) often for 3 hours or more. Whilst this is probably necessary when we're getting things sorted out, I'd like to suggest that the next board has shorter and less frequent meetings. I think meeting once per month for no more than 2 hours would be ideal, so that it's not too much of a burdon on Board members and we avoid burning our volunteers out. At the same time we can change the Board into more of an "oversight" role, and do more "organising" work outside.
My experience of starting up a voluntary organisation is that the workload in getting it running is far, far greater than actually running it. In the first year, our Committee (the executive) met eight times, I think, with an average length of about 4 hours, and the longest meeting running to over six hours. Since then, the Committee has never had more than five full meetings in a year, and the longest meeting has been three and a half hours.
The other thing, from observing some meetings on IRC, is that it seems bloody difficult to chair - the chairman cannot easily shut up people talking when they shouldn't, and it takes longer to conclude that everything has been contributed on a topic and he can move on. I understand that IRC meetings are necessary, but they're inherently inefficient.
2009/4/1 AndrewRT andrewrturvey@googlemail.com:
One aspect which might be putting people off is the frequency and length of the Board meetings we've been having to date. The initial Board has met 23 times so far (nearly once per week on average) often for 3 hours or more. Whilst this is probably necessary when we're getting things sorted out, I'd like to suggest that the next board has shorter and less frequent meetings. I think meeting once per month for no more than 2 hours would be ideal, so that it's not too much of a burdon on Board members and we avoid burning our volunteers out. At the same time we can change the Board into more of an "oversight" role, and do more "organising" work outside.
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.
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