The Board has decided monthly in-person meetings will help us facilitate the momentum of FAN in this first year and would like to codify the process.
In looking at City, Neighbirhood, and personal meeting schedules,we decided that the 3rd Monday of each month would be the best fit for our purposes. The location will rotate depending on our discussion needs and previous location spots - we’ll try to spread these across the city.
If you have location suggestions we’d gladly entertain them. We’d like to keep near to public transit primarily, and if possible allow food & drink since we’ll often be meeting around meal times, and depending on the content possibly take reservations or have media projection / amplification possibilities.
March Board Meeting: 7pm, Monday March 21st Hopfields 3110 Guadalupe St. Austin TX 78705
Meet us in the back room to discuss this month’s Agenda Items, or just speak at the Public Comment section if you have something pressing to address yourselves.
There’s parking in the lots next door at the Dry Cleaners - both in front and back.
The 1, 3, and 22 bus stops are all very close as well.
Though we both debate and vote online I agree Public Meetings are an indispensable feature of any proper neighborhood organization! The following are probably best codified in Bylaws, but can be documented in Policies and Procedures first. Is the Secretary maintaining a binder of these?
My contribution is [it be official Policy that] all meetings be open to the public, with reasonable publicity and the entire Membership notified at least one week in advance. Without exception. Since this is a neighborhood org, I feel that private and/or secret meetings constitute a betrayal of the contract which exists between the Board and Members. I have a local example in mind.
There should be some sort of strict framework for Emergency Meetings as well.
A detailed Draft Minutes and/or Meeting Report should be issued promptly to communicate the activities and business that transpired. This is for the benefit of our majority membership who will be voting online about proposals arising at these Meetings. I feel that minimalization, delaying, and other obstacles to understanding an org’s activities is institutional disenfranchisement of it’s Members. Again, I have a local example in mind.
And, I might be pushing the envelope here, but an audio, or even video recording of meetings should be made and posted online. Youtube works great for us! This would be a trivial addition when the meeting has a mic and P.A.
Well Chad, your suggestions are mostly things we’re employing.
We’re making these meetings reoccurring specifically so that everyone has ample time to plan and include them into schedules. They’re included on the FAN google calendar. We’re posting the details here because the general membership is indeed invited!
You’ll see the agenda for this March meeting linked in the original post I made above. There is a public comment item on every agenda that we’ve been including.
We admittedly haven’t nailed down a process for publicly posting them, and will be discussing these exact details in the March Board Meeting (it’s the Operations item that I’m speaking to), but all agendas and meeting minutes past and future are kept in the “digital binder” if you will, of Google Drive. Some of these have indeed been publicly posted, but again, we’ll shore up the details soon.
We’ll be meeting tonight, in just a couple of hours. Please come join us!
You can send a message or post here if you’d like to have us keep an eye our for you.