Last night Diedre Conkling shared the URL for an ALA Committee on Organization (COO) document about electronic participation and ALA’s open meetings policy.  I don’t recall if she posted it to the NMRT List, the Council list, or both.

Early this decade there were members who objected to committees doing any work outside of the ALA Annual Conference and Midwinter Meeting.  COO responded by defining “meeting”–basing the definition largely on Sturgis–in a way that clearly excluded asynchronous email exchanges and listserv discussion from that definition.  The definition, approved by the ALA Council, is part of ALA policy.  At the time it was proposed and passed, it was intended (and I believe still functions) as a permissive policy/definition.  It makes it clear that a lot of work done outside of the f2f meetings at Annual Conference and the Midwinter Meeting is not a meeting and therefore not covered by the open meetings policy.  In the absence of that definition, some contended that email discussions and the like violated the open meetings policy.  (I’ll keep my comments to this narrow issue and not comment on open lists, an issue COO did not discuss at the time.)

The issue is broader than the open meetings policy.  It is about participation opportunities, not just meetings.  Early this decade COO (while I served as its chair) chose to take an incremental approach to virtual (a term I personally dislike) participation.  The committee took that approach because the political realities at the time were that incremental is the approach that could win support from the majority of the committee and the Council.  To learn more about the issue’s background and contradictory opinions that members expressed at the time, see the collection of COO documents (including the one Deidre cited last night) at http://tinyurl.com/4lbp2h.

The ALA Policy Manual, the ALA Bylaws, and the Sturgis parliamentary manual all play roles in this.  It is my understanding that the electronic participation task force that Janet Swan Hill chairs is taking another look at how these intersect and their implications for policy.

Two things have unquestionably changed in recent years—new technologies and member’s use of these technologies.  A third change, which may be generational, is members’ desire to experiment and explore new modes of participation using these and emerging technologies.

Meanwhile, we have policies, bylaws, etc., on the books.

I have ideas about these issues. I have given them a good deal of thought for a number of years.  I haven’t yet prepared my inaugural speech for July 1; I’ll share my ideas then.