February, 5, 2008 archives

you will travel to many exotic places.

i got snippy with brady this evening at a downtown los angeles neighborhood council “committee” hearing, and i am sorry about that. and really, i have a lot to thank brady for — he is helping to put in motion exciting things for both the community and me personally.

but i got snippy because once again a meeting devolved into a tussle over what the rules were, and what a committee can do, and whether this really was even a committee, and how it could become a committee, and what the composition of a committee should be.

all of which is spelled out very clearly in the bylaws and robert’s rules of order. you can even cheat and just read the “in brief” edition of robert’s rules.

it pisses me off to see the vp of administration, the closest thing that dlanc has to a parliamentarian, constantly cite undocumented “standing rules” as reasons to come up with more barriers for actually appointing members to the mostly-defunct standing committees.

and it is galling that the dlanc president still does not know how to count votes all these many months after one of the board members tried to school him. and makes jokes about it.

it is not about getting slowed down by a bunch of rules. it is about taking yourself seriously so that others will take you seriously. it is about realizing that if the neighborhood council wants to be effective in the broader political arena, it has to demonstrate some basic competence in its own meetings.