When does a meeting become a "past meeting"?

I support the ability to lock the FTH meeting agenda at some point.

In an ideal situation at the meeting all Members would be viewing the agenda in real time. Until that is a reality, a cutoff is a viable solution.

I would prefer this feature to be a default that the VP Ed. or Administrator would set. And, I believe it would be much easier for members to set the LOCKOUT time using the START time as a reference. For example, if meeting start time is 7 PM and the LOCKOUT is set for 2 hours, this would mean members would not be able to sign-up for a role after 5 PM.

As personal experience: I belong to two Clubs. Start time is 7:00 PM. In each Members have been asked not to schedule a role after 5:30 PM. Yet, in each we have had the TM arrive and distribute the agenda, ask someone to fill a vacant role only to learn that a member scheduled that role after the TM printed the agenda. The LOCKOUT would eliminate this challenge.

jdoucet wrote: I support the ability to lock the FTH meeting agenda at some point.

In an ideal situation at the meeting all Members would be viewing the agenda in real time. Until that is a reality, a cutoff is a viable solution.

I would prefer this feature to be a default that the VP Ed. or Administrator would set. And, I believe it would be much easier for members to set the LOCKOUT time using the START time as a reference. For example, if meeting start time is 7 PM and the LOCKOUT is set for 2 hours, this would mean members would not be able to sign-up for a role after 5 PM.

As personal experience: I belong to two Clubs. Start time is 7:00 PM. In each Members have been asked not to schedule a role after 5:30 PM. Yet, in each we have had the TM arrive and distribute the agenda, ask someone to fill a vacant role only to learn that a member scheduled that role after the TM printed the agenda. The LOCKOUT would eliminate this challenge.

Thanks! Keep in mind that we do have a "lockout" in place currently--however, currently it does not take effect until the day after the meeting date. What I am exploring is the possibility of changing that in a way that would allow for more flexibility by clubs that want it. Also, we certainly would not want clubs to discourage members from signing up for roles, even if it was at the last minute. What this would do is to allow clubs to make the website work in way that is consistent with the policy set by the club rather than clubs having to work around the way the website works. Also, it would not prevent people from taking roles at the last minute, but that would have to be more at the discretion of the VPE.

My concern with something like this is that it could become the cutoff time that the agenda is printed. What if the agenda is normally printed the night before a meeting (and that is set as the lockout time), but members do not commit to a role until 2 hrs before the meeting. Don't you then end up discouraging members from signing up for roles?

Or maybe the lockout *should* be set when the agenda is printed by the VPE or Toastmaster. We know when you print an agenda...

Despite how it may sound, I really don't want to over-complicate this. I just want to explore whether there may be a better approach to this than we are currently using.

Agreed. We do not want to discourage members from signing up for roles.

If there was such a feature available, the two Clubs I belong to would make use of it.

Thank you for all you do.

Should the cutoff be different for the agenda editors (e.g. Toastmaster) vs regular members? Maybe you would want the Toastmaster to be able to edit the agenda during the meeting but not regular members? (e.g. for clubs that might show & update the agenda via a projector during the meeting) Just thinking out loud here...

At my club the members print their own agendas a day or two before the meeting. The VPE asks members not to change roles on the agenda after a "cutoff time" 2 days before the meeting, so we all have the same agenda at the meeting (Late changes are announced by the Toastmaster). Members are asked not to print until after the "cutoff time". I would like to be able to lock the agenda to role changes at a fixed time, but still allow speakers to edit their speech details after that time.
Even better would be to allow members (optionally?) to edit their speech project and title after the agenda is reconciled. At the moment the VPE has to do that

One of my clubs is hybrid. We meet onsite monthly and via Zoom videoconferencing weekly. So we rarely print our agenda on paper. Even tonight the agenda changed within a couple of minutes of the meeting starting.

Perhaps it could be a button for the Toastmaster of the meeting to "lock" the agenda for member changes to force people to connect them directly for anything last minute.