Robert's Rules (Re: ADs who are also WG chairs)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

<note - this is offtopic, but seems informative... begging indulgence from 
the chairs....>

--On fredag, juli 04, 2003 09:44:59 -0700 "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" 
<pbaker at verisign.com> wrote:

>
>> serious question:
>>
>> do you have an example of a version of Robert's rules of
>> order that has
>> successfully been applied to mailing lists?
>
> This was the subject of some study by my group when I was at IETF. We ran
> an Open Meeting over the Internet for Vice President Al Gore.
>
> That was a moderated forum using an adapted form of Recher's dialectic,
> however the moderation was not essential in that case.

do you have a reference? I'm not familiar with Recher's dialectic...

>> RR has a number of concepts that are hard to apply to a
>> mailing list -
>> recognition of speakers by the chair, expulsion from the room
>> of disorderly
>> members, voting in real time on points of procedure, for
>> instance. I'd be
>> interested in hearing of examples of successful adaptations.
>
> Some of the rules are not appropriate because the constraints are not. For
> example it is not necessary to require recognition by the chair since it
> is possible for more than one person to speak at once.
>
> The key point is what to do with respect to decisions and what to do with
> in person and conference call meeting time.
>
> What we do in OASIS in most cases is to run with an abreviated version of
> the rules except when there is an actual controversy and someone wants to
> make sure process is followed.

that's been my impression with most places that claim to follow RR too - 
that unless there's a conflict, things jut run in an ad-hoc fashion, but 
that once there is conflict, one has the ruleset to fall back on to ensure 
orderly and clear decision-making.

And I actually think that's an eminently sensible way to run meetings, and 
wish we knew how to make mailing lists do that.

                  Harald