Town Hall Meeting 2011

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The first Free Geek Town Hall Meeting was held on Sunday, October 2nd, at the Eagles Lodge.

http://lists.freegeek.org/pipermail/regulars/2011-September/000359.html

Reports

Our lovely outreach coordinator, Jessa, created and presented several reports on the state of Free Geek.

There was also a report from the board of directors about the challenges and successes of the organization in the last year.

Volunteer Representatives

As this was the inaugural town hall meeting, both (newly-created) volunteer representative board seats were to be filled. The candidates were:

Jason Owen
Eric Hamilton
Joe Bourguignon
Larry Lloyd

http://www.freegeek.org/free-geek-elections

Discussion

There was much discussed.

Lessons Learned

We knew going into this that there would be many mistakes made as we figured out how to organize and run such an event. There are two things that happened around the same time but are very distinct: the volunteer representative election and the town hall meeting itself.

Election

Some of the things we should have done differently include:

get @freegeek.org email addresses to candidates before bios are posted, and include them in the candidate descriptions.
post bios further in advance.
explain the voting system better.

Some of the things that went swimmingly:

Meet and greet at the THM.
ballot distribution - crossing people off a list when they received a ballot was simple and worked well.

Meeting

Next time, perhaps we should change...

a more clearly defined division of labor - one person should not have had to do all the reporting.
document the results more quickly after the meeting.
rotate discussion groups - people seemed to enjoy the small group discussions, but wanted to be in more than one group.

But we should definitely still do...

the discussion-seeding brainstorming was pretty cool.
the discussion format worked really well.