LITA members: This is your board. Do you want to see the sausage-making?
On July 3, I created an online document in the LITA Board’s (ALA) Connect space titled ”What sort of Connect posts should be closed?” This really got me thinking about my perspective on transparency, and the discussions that I have been having with the LITA board, with friends and with co-workers on the topic. (NB: I wrote almost all of the post below the same afternoon as the Connect post, but before the ensuing comments were left there.)
If you are a member of LITA, you will receive a quarterly email from LITA’s Executive Director, Mary Taylor. Each “Member Update” ends with encouragement to connect with LITA in various ways, one of which is to reach out to the leadership, anytime. Log into the LITA website with your ALA credentials to view contact information for all of us. Before I delve into Board stuff, I should explain that Mary is an employee of ALA, but the Board members are not. A Vice-President/President-Elect and two or three At-Large Board members are elected each year by the LITA membership (did YOU vote, hm??). We each have our own day jobs, and many of us are involved in other ALA Divisions as well. We are your volunteer leadership, and are not ALA employees. ALA provides three full-time staff to conduct the business of the organization–managing the budget, paying for speakers and teachers, working with Conference Services, coordinating online education, and probably lots of things that I’m forgetting to list here. Their duties also include reaching out to members, hence the aforementioned Member Updates.
So, here is your Board (photo taken at the 2012 Midwinter meeting in Dallas) :
By the way, until that photo is updated, here is a list of who’s in it:
Front, L to R: me (now VP, eeek), Adriene Lim (Councillor), Zoe Stewart-Marshall (President), Colleen Cuddy (Past President), Karen Starr (now past-past president), Mary Taylor (LITA staff).
Back, L to R: Maurice York (former board member), Aaron Dobbs (former board member), Dale Poulter (Parliamentarian), Jason Griffey (Board member at-large), David Lee King (Board member at large), John Blyberg (Board member at large).
Before you ask, the photographer posed us, and we stayed there, like gender-segregated sheep.
If you have followed #litabd activity on Twitter and on our ALA Connect group, you’ll know that we have talked a great deal about transparency, how transparency relates to privacy, and how it relates to what current President Zoe Stewart-Marshall (or was it Ranti Junus?) termed the “sausage-making” phase of discussions. If you have listened to any of the streamed governance meetings, you’ll know that there are differing opinions, and that sometimes those differences are in stark contrast to one another.
I want to explore this “sausage-making” idea a bit more. The reference is pretty obvious: those who consume sausage probably do not want to see it made. I’m definitely on board with that. To extend the reference into the arena of ideas, setting an idea loose before it’s fully vetted and fleshed out can result in setting expectations that later go unmet, as an idea evolves from its nascent stage to its completed iteration. Which, if one is in the healthcare industry or conducting a war, could be a very bad thing.
The concept opposite to keeping one’s sausage-making under wraps is transparency, and on paper, the LITA board embraces transparency. In March 2007, Clive Thompson wrote an article in Wired Magazine about transparency, titled “The See-Through CEO.” One paragraph in particular struck a chord with me, so much so that I remember it more than five years later:
“Some of this isn’t even about business; it’s a cultural shift, a redrawing of the lines between what’s private and what’s public. A generation has grown up blogging, posting a daily phonecam picture on Flickr and listing its geographic position in real time on Dodgeball [now 4Square] and Google Maps. For them, authenticity comes from online exposure. It’s hard to trust anyone who doesn’t list their dreams and fears on Facebook.” [emphasis mine]
This is the point-of-view from which I operate, as a librarian, as a photographer, mom, friend, partner, and yes, LITA Board member. Let me be clear–I am not speaking for anyone but myself here, and I am certainly not speaking for the Board as a whole, nor as The Voice of LITA. I use Twitter, flickr, instagram and Facebook to connect with my professional and personal friends. I use these same tools to reach out to LITA members before, during, and after Board meetings, to ask them (YOU) questions about the organization and to put the word out about LITA goings-on. As far as I know, my doing so has not caused harm to anyone; in fact, participating online has garnered great member feedback during meetings and programs. We ask and at least two or three of you answer! (ha ha)
You might have guessed by now that one of the initiatives that I will continue to work on is transparency, this year as LITA Vice-President, and next year, as President. For this year, that means bringing transparency to the committee appointment process. There are a LOT of committees and representative slots to fill that begin July 1, 2013, and it’s the VP’s job to fill them all. It’s my hope that doing this as transparently as possible (working within the privacy caveat and ALA guidelines, lest some of you readers are nervous… 
) will get more of you engaged in and excited about the organization that we hold dear.
What do YOU think about transparency? I have heard LITA members say that they want to know what the Board is doing, but how much is too much? How much is enough?
Generally speaking, as a community member, I want to know what was discussed (the topics), a summary (preferably with attribution, particularly when the opinions are expressed by officers of the organization) of the opinions expressed, and the decisions made. I usually don’t want to know verbatim who said what. Agendas beforehand, minutes afterward are good.
I feel there’s a difference between a live stream of discussion (to replicate being in the room, for those matters that are open to discussion) and a recording. Ignoring that anyone could record the stream (anyone could bring a video camera, too), I think the ephemeral nature of the conversation suits the meeting, while the permanence of the summary suits the organization’s needs.
Yay, I’m in the picture!
I spent my 3 years (2009-2012) on the LITA Board trying to open the deliberative process and the discussions/debates to the view of (and invite participation from!) the LITA membership.
LITA Board is not as far along as I want(ed it to be by the time I rolled off).
Sadly, ALA Council is a more open body than LITA Board and this is the greatest regret of my time on LITA Board.
“How’s that,” you say?
LITA Board does not have an open, searchable archive of the “litaboar” discussion list – it is available for subscribers only (though in the (recent ~2010-ish) past it had been open and searchable)
(ALA Council has “alacoun-ro” an openly subscribable, read-only version of “alacoun” (the Council List) and an open, searchable archive)
Locked away in the vaults of private posts on the LITA Board Connect space is great information, some well written and others in various stages of development (and occasionally, abandonment).
The current board has a great opportunity to wildly succeed by providing more transparency (or at least translucency) by opening LITA governance and organizational discussions to the LITA membership.
“Communication Out” about what “the leaders” are doing is a good step — but an open invitation to the membership to participate is essential for future organizational success.
Thanks, Ken! I agree with “agenda beforehand, minutes after” for meetings at a minimum, and the distinction you make between the function of streaming and recording is a good one. I think our minutes aren’t what you outline above, but this is a discussion that the group is beginning to have. I wonder where the too much/not enough line lies with work done outside official meetings though. Thoughts there?
I’ll have to equivocate again on the question of work done outside official meetings. If the work is really a subcommittee, or task force, etc., that has regular meetings, then the same principal could apply: agenda first, minutes after. If the work is more ad hoc, in preparation for an in-person meeting, then I think the “real” meeting is where the issues get aired.
For me, at any rate, I’m happy enough knowing something I care about is going to be discussed. If I care, I can add my thoughts to the discussion beforehand via email, chat, or some other channel with individual board members, or the group address. The prerequisite for knowing if I care is knowing what’s on the agenda. And that also allows me to suggest topics that aren’t on the agenda already.
@Ken, hmm… I’m trying to think–without actually going back through Connect threads; it is Friday night, after all–whether the stuff we’ve done was all in preparation for an in-person meeting or not. All motions made are reaffirmed at the next in-person meeting, but it seems like there is a lot of discussion that either peters out or turns into something else, either a motion or a task force or a future, in-person discussion. At any rate, your point is well-taken. Thanks for your comments.
As for agenda items, that’s interesting. Do you (or anyone) know of an agenda item put before the board from a member? Our practice has been for the agenda to be drafted by the president and LITA staff a few weeks before the meeting. The draft agenda is generally posted to Connect (or the listserv) as a closed item, then the final agenda is posted to Connect publicly shortly before the meeting. That does not preclude someone asking a board member or committee to add something, but a quick search of the most recent version of The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure doesn’t provide for addition of agenda items by people who are not affiliated with the “assembly” (i.e., Board) or one of its committees.
That said, I WOULD TOTALLY LOVE AND SUPPORT it if members put agenda items before us. We just might have to be parliamentarily creative to actually get them there.
I am definitely still learning parliamentary procedure, and I have to say it feels like we’ve been informal with that, anyway. (Again, speaking for MYSELF and no one else…)
@Aaron, there is a motion on the table to re-open the litaboard list archives. The comments pro and con are well thought-out, and all of them (IMNSHO) add to the discussion. I personally LOVE IT that we are having the discussion in a public forum; like I said elsewhere today, doing so lays our motives bare and leaves no room for obfuscatory misinterpretation. After reading everyone’s opinions, I’m actually not sure where I stand. Does the fact that the archive was accidentally left open necessarily mean that it *should* be left open? Dunno… still thinking.
I know that I am adding to the discussion months after you posted this, Cindi, but I want to just +1 to Ken and you on the importance of not just doing transparency for transparency’s sake, but rather the posting of agendas and notes with action items (not minutes) of decisions made from the meeting. A summary of a meeting is much more digestable than watching a stream of a 3-hour meeting hoping to get something from it. (Although keeping that meeting recording could still be valuable).
On a side note, I’d love to know if you ever found out if anyone (or LITA members) can submit potential Board meeting agenda items. Any luck?
Rachel, the answer I got was “the agenda is set by the President.” Thanks for your comment.