OSI Board Meeting Notes April 20, 2015

Note Taker: Linda Stevenson

Bin Gardner: Suzanne Daigle

Present:

Suzanne Daigle, Karen Davis, Daniel Mezick, Kevin O’Brien, Harold Shinsato, Linda Stevenson

1.) Concerns were raised around the Board’s monthly online meetings’ structure and efficiency.  Possibilities to     address these issues included:

·       Dragging things out of Trello to pre-set an agenda three or four days before the meeting by a meeting volunteer convener, and the agenda could be refined at the beginning of each meeting

·       Learning the McCarthy style check-in

·       Naming/owning all items in the Trello bin

·       Distinguishing between operations and policy making

·       Using a grab and go email policy like Agile Boston

·       Making the best use of online tools for online meetings

·       Deciding the notetaker ahead of time (but for facilitator role?)

·       Using a spreadsheet like the OS Hotline

·       Keeping to 90 minutes with a mid-way break

·       Letting our mission “to hold space for Open Space” be our guide

·       Keeping our commitments

·       All activating whatever we are passionate about

·       Do we need both a convener and a facilitator?

·       Is the group being the authority a problem?

2)     The Trello bin was cleaned up

3)     Add a “Bell of Awesomeness” to the onboarding process and use it judiciously

4)     Goal setting could be replaced with direction setting

5)     Hold a conversation on structure serving the goals and emergence

6)     IRS tax filings 990 and Washington State Annual Report are done

7)     Online Agile coaching for OST folks is going well with 6 people on the last call, good questions, emergent lessons, and a fabulous teacher

8)     The 501c3 policy and criteria writing will focus on WOSonOS and the January OS

9)     We can experiment with sociocracy (background of holocracy) which is Scrum’s big brother and start by checking out Wikipedia and lerning more

10)  Harold will form a subgroup to investigate sociocracy including Joh Buck’s work on collaborative governance (www.sociocracy.info) and make a recommendation for us to consider with Daniel as a point person

11)  Keep in mind that “less is more” and our simplicity has led to some amazing meetings and emergence from a very deep place of being

12)  Check out the McCarthy boot camp

13)  More dialogue can happen in a safe space on the issues around the appropriate amount of structure

14)  Harold is starting a video project on an unfolding Open Space Manifesto

15)  Harold is  beginning Open Space training conversations