[1281] in UA Senate
Re: Laptops
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Steadman)
Sun Apr 24 06:01:36 2011
From: William Steadman <willst@MIT.EDU>
To: ua-senate@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTin_vZ0_Ntg27sjiSKjBRZqvPjv2Pw@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2011 06:01:52 -0400
If every representative were to make motions to: close discussion,
postpone, etc whenever they felt it was appropriate then you don't have
a meeting, you have 30 arguing about procedure.
I don't walk into Senate trying to gauge the progress of a discussion
because that is not my job. My job as Chairman of Space Planning is to
provide appropriate info in that area. Gauging the progress of a
discussion is in fact the Speaker's job.
I recommend the Speaker move to end discussion or even better call for a
motion from the assembly whenever he thinks discussion is not useful.
There is a reason he controls the length of debate time. Yet despite the
length of all of our meetings it has only been invoked once this year.
On Sun, 2011-04-24 at 04:16 -0400, Jonté Craighead (UA Speaker) wrote:
> Hi, guys:
>
> This is meant to be a notice for Monday's meeting.
>
> tl;dr: No laptops during the guest speaker and no laptops after
> 11:00pm.
>
> The MIT-Online Faculty Study Group has asked that the entire session
> at Monday's meeting take place off the record. Because of this, and
> the fact that this group will be our guest, laptops must not be open.
>
> Furthermore, I am going to request that laptops also be closed during
> any business that takes place after 11:00pm. If you have noticed
> anything this year, it's that, usually, fewer than half of you are
> paying attention to the discussion at once past about this time. If
> the discussion on the floor is not interesting or useful, you should
> do something about it (i.e. move to close discussion, postpone, etc.).
> This is your Senate, you should own it. Otherwise, we run into
> situations where a small number of participants are the only ones
> driving the discussions (and effectively acting as the only student
> representatives).
>
> Instituting this rule is not fun, but I feel it's necessary to keep
> people engaged, or at the very least, ensure that our last three
> meetings aren't also our longest.
>
> I would be happy to answer any questions here, but if you have
> comments or want to start a discussion, please move this e-mail to
> ua-senate@.
>
> Thanks,
> Jonté Craighead
>
> Speaker of the Senate
> MIT Undergraduate Association
> Course 1C: Class of 2013
