This document collects advice and experiences on how to conduct advisory board meetings. It's intended for use by the chair (or acting chair) and the secretary.
Some miscellaneous advice, in no particular order, and some of it perhaps obvious anyway.
As an aside, note that historically, meetings were organized by a long-term chair. The new plan is to rotate the chair annually. This might imply we should do things a little differently, for example perhaps the Scala Center could handle a little more of the advance work, e.g. scheduling.
The person responsible for scheduling the meeting should try to find a time suitable for everyone, though it's rarely possible that everyone can attend any given meeting.
Priority should be given to the SC executive director, the technical adviser, the chairperson and the secretary, without whom the meeting can't really happen.
If some other attendees are unable to attend on a particular time, priority should be given to those who are presenting proposals, and at the very least, an individual email should be sent to those members who are unavailable to check if they can delegate to someone else. With all else equal, any remaining toss-up between two dates should probably be decided in favor of any members who missed the previous meeting, and then in favor of those members who offered the greatest flexibility on their availability.
- Send out the meeting agenda a few days ahead of time, to give the board time to consider topics in advance.
- The chair or secretary should also upload the agenda to https://github.com/scalacenter/advisoryboard/tree/main/agendas
- Before the meeting begins, review the agenda and arrive at a rough idea of how long each part of the meeting should take, in order to fit everything in.
- Before beginning the meeting, start the recording. Permission to make the recording should be sought from everyone present; no one should ever be recorded without their knowledge and consent.
- Make sure the recording clearly indicates who was present and which board members were absent, if any.
- Encourage and invite engagement from board members during the director's report. The report needn't be a long unbroken monologue.
- Let the conversation flow when there's plenty of time; apply pressure when there's not.
- There will be people connecting remotely, who won't feel as connected, so make sure they have every opportunity to join in, and check regularly that they're still connected.
- Invite specific people to talk if you think they might offer a different perspective. (This includes asking the technical advisor for input, if appropriate.)
- Ask for clarification whenever someone says something which may not be as widely understood as they presume.
- There will be votes. Make sure the secretary captures the votes, or put them into a spreadsheet. Pause the meeting if necessary to make sure that votes have been accurately recorded.
- On procedural matters, don't be afraid to make ad-hoc decisions as needed. The rules were written without knowing how things would actually work out in practice. The rules are there for our collective benefit if you need to refer to them, but if you need to make a practical decision for the obvious benefit of moving forward with the meeting, do it. You only need to be extra-careful and extra-correct if someone might be upset by the decision.
Being secretary mainly just means producing minutes afterwards and updating the advisoryboard repo on GitHub. For producing minutes, it's best to have a recording of the meeting to refer to (ideally video, but audio is better than nothing).
But technology can't be trusted, so it's best for the secretary (or someone they ask to help) takes notes live, too, especially when there is voting, so if the recording doesn't turn out, we can produce some kind of minutes without having to reconstruct everything from memory.
The live notes needn't be detailed, it's not necessary to pound away at your keyboard the whole time like a court stenographer, just hit the high points and make sure you get concrete things like votes, action items that arise, etc. Interrupt the meeting if necessary to ask for clarification.