[779] in UA Senate
Re: Bill to Save Time
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Steadman)
Thu Sep 30 00:23:20 2010
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:23:08 -0400
From: William Steadman <willst@MIT.EDU>
To: Alex Dehnert <adehnert@mit.edu>
CC: ua-senate@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <4CA40D1C.3030205@mit.edu>
I will strike "he shall provide them to the senate" if you wish. Then
it reads "Speaker makes rules he wants and if people don't like it they
can use Roberts Rules. He does not need to write any rules. If he wants,
he'll just say we're using Roberts Rules as is.
In my view, we can use Roberts Rules as a basis and make modifications.
For example, every time we "divided the body" Jonte spent a minute to
count that an overwhelming majority was for the bill. That will happen
every meeting and is entirely unnecessary. Perhaps its not in Roberts
Rules, but I don't know. I don't want to read it all to find out. We can
still "divide the body"/call for a hand vote, but don't need to count.
Also, we should move straight to voting for bills and skip ending
debate, unless somebody objects.
Will
On 09/30/2010 12:07 AM, Alex Dehnert wrote:
> On 09/29/2010 11:16 PM, William Steadman wrote:
>> Since I felt we spent too much time at the last meeting, this bill
>> removes us following Roberts Rules of Order and lets the Speaker decide
>> which parliamentary procedure to follow. If 5 senators object to his
>> method we return to Roberts Rules of Order.
>>
>> It mostly speaks for itself. I like the quote by the GSC.
>>
>> Happy to change it,
>>
>> Will
>>
>> Bill to Save Time
>>
>> Whereas: 15 minutes were wasted in meeting 42 U.A.S 1 on a point of
>> order, and in general by unessecary parliamentary procedure.
>>
>> Whereas: The G.S.C. ammended their consitution via bill 51 G.S.C. 9.2
>> which specificly states ``The G.S.C. The Bylaws currently state that
>> Roberts Rules of Order should be used as a means of
>> maintaining order at Council meetings. However, these rules of order are
>> very
>> complicated, requiring formal motions to be made for even the most minor
>> of things.
>> Experience has shown that attempting to follow Roberts Rules leads to
>> confusion and
>> inefficiency. This amendment removes the restriction for using Roberts
>> Rules, and
>> instead simply states that the “presiding officer shall follow a
>> Parliamentary procedure to
>> be made available to the Council”.''
>>
>> Whereas: The Speaker already interprets Roberts Rules of Order.
>>
>>
>>
>> It is resolved that: Article IV Section B subsection 1 is ammended to
>> say ``Any aspect of parliamentary procedure or rules not covered by
>> these Bylaws or the UA Constitution shall be determined by the speaker.
>> They will make this procedure available to the Senate. If durring a
>
> AIUI, that boils down to "the Speaker should write some rules of
> order, and give them to the Senate", which seems... excessive. Writing
> a good set of parliamentary rules seems annoyingly time consuming.
>
> RONR has the advantage that it's widely used, so it tends to be the
> thing people are most likely to know ("most likely" may not mean much,
> admittedly), you can find good teaching and reference materials, and
> the details have been looked at enough to be sane.
>
> I don't think Monday's incident was typical, and I think that as Jonte
> grows more used to running meetings, he'll grow better at using RONR
> in a way that moves the meeting forward without being perceived as
> interfering with anyone's ability to be fairly heard (through speech
> and/or voting).
>
>> senate meeting, 5 senators object to the method of parliamentary
>> procedure, then the Speaker will defer to Roberts Rules of Order (latest
>> addtion) for the remainder of the meeting.''
>
> ~~Alex
