A I P
C O M M U N I C AT O R FA L L
2020
President’s Message: So You Want to Hold an Electronic Meeting? By Al Gage CPP, PRP, PAP
After holding the most successful, at least in terms of registration and attendance, Annual Session that any current members can recall, I have a few insights on the actual parliamentary law of a virtual business meeting. We had over 162 Registrants and an average participation at the Annual Session of 122 participants.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Because we used Zoom, those will be the focus of this article. Further, the Zoom Meeting features most closely approximate the features of an in-person meeting.
President’s Letter
1
Links to Revised Governing Documents
2
Message from the Education Director
3
Elected Officers
4
AIP Officers
4
Calendar of Events
4
Deadline Dates - Communicator
4
AIPSC, 2nd Edition, Authorship Team Update
5
Joint Code of Professional Responsibility for Parliamentarians
6
Accrediting Department Annual Report
6
Resolution to Honor Henry Martyn Robert and His Legacy
7
New Members
8
Amazon Smile
9
Platform: First, let’s look at the process of recognition in an electronic meeting. Some members had suggested that we consider Zoom Webinar, and the Tech Team and I rejected that suggestion in favor of using Zoom Meeting. The primary limitation of Zoom Webinar is that the participants do not have control of their own microphone and the ability to mute and unmute themselves. Some meeting administrators see that inability for the participants to interact as a feature of the Zoom Webinar platform. I STRONGLY disagree with this position. While it allows you to maintain total control over the meeting, it violates the fundamental right of a person to make an interrupting motion. All of the interrupting motions are at least to some degree time sensitive. The one major complaint in meetings that I have served was that “I raised my hand and was never called on to take my Point of Order or Appeal.” The way we performed this function at the Annual Session using Zoom Meetings was that you had to raise your hand for a Point of Order or an Appeal and all other motions or seeking of recognition had to be done through the chat to the “Tech Team”. By limiting the raise hand feature to just those two motions as opposed to the other interrupting motions such as a Factual Inquiry or Parliamentary Inquiry, we knew as the operators that we had to immediately address those with a Zoom hand raised. And, should the “Tech Team” (all credentialed parliamentarians) fail to respond to the hand raised feature, the member could still unmute themselves and make the Point of Order or Appeal AND if failed to be recognized for any of the other interrupting motions, could address that with the same two motions simply by unmuting their microphones and raising the issue. Admittedly, allowing open mikes can lead to the occasional expletive (which was not the tech team) or pets barking, mewing or making goat noises (even though it was a cat) in the background but this is easily solved by the operator muting them. Again, the inability of an individual to make at least a point of order or an appeal without the assistance of someone else unmuting them, is a fundamental flaw in the set-up of the webinar-type meetings. Continued on following page
AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PARLIAMENTARIANS Page 1
FA L L
Fall 2020
2020
AIP Communicator