[honeychile]

Originally Posted by emb021

There are a couple of ways that parliamentary procedure can help you keep your meetings shorter.

The 'standard rule' in discussions is that each person is allowed to speak twice for 10 minutes on each matter. (this can be shortened or extended by the group by a 2/3rd vote). Discussion needs to be on the matter at hand, not extraneous cr*p. Enforcing that can keep things civil and shorter.

Using committees properly can also help. Instead of discussing in detail each and every event, etc, allow your committees to do that in their own committee meetings outside the main meeting. This way the committees report on the even, with them more or less fully planned out, and the main group hopefully just agrees (or not) on them. Social events would be planned out by your social committee, fundraisers by your fundraising committee, service/philanthropy events by that committee, etc.

Again, this is why learning parliamentary procedure is so important. I encorporated as session on it in my chapters pledge program when I was pledgemaster, something I recommend. Refresher sessions with the membership is always a good idea, also.

That's exactly why using RR properly works so well. Our Minutes read more like Hours. We beat topics into the ground - then we switched to 3 pros/3cons. Everything was planned out and ran like a well-tuned Jaguar!