Very Simple Questions from a very simple person

So, are you saying it's not 100% the system will recognize who the Toastmaster is?

Blaine

Blaine67@gmail.com wrote: So, are you saying it's not 100% the system will recognize who the Toastmaster is?

Blaine

Correct. It depends on whether one of the roles matches the above patterns. I have tried to look at improving the pattern match, but the reality is that it will never be 100% perfect for every club, which is why I would like to phase it out and implement a better approach.

Blaine67@gmail.com wrote: Cube, if you inform your members to go online, and just PICK the role they want, you won't have to do all that transcribing.

Blaine

No, no, no. That's what everyone does already. That's the "old" way. The problem is that not enough of them do it. Hence, we've started to throw the net over their heads at the meeting.

Is it a little more work? Yeah. Accomplishing improvements shouldn't be any work?

Cube wrote:

Blaine67@gmail.com wrote: Cube, if you inform your members to go online, and just PICK the role they want, you won't have to do all that transcribing.

Blaine

No, no, no. That's what everyone does already. That's the "old" way. The problem is that not enough of them do it. Hence, we've started to throw the net over their heads at the meeting.

Is it a little more work? Yeah. Accomplishing improvements shouldn't be any work?

My club ran into the same problem. Also, some members are not that technically savvy.

How my club handles it... We only produce 5 future agendas at any given time corresponding to the signup sheet, and the fifth agenda is always added right before a meeting. The purpose of that is to give those people that show up at meetings the first shot at signing up on the agenda just added. (It encourages meeting attendance.)

However, we also have Role Change Notifications set up to handle anyone what wants to add themselves or drop a role between meetings. Therefore, people can sign up for any agenda of the 5 future agendas with the caveat that people attending meetings always get the first shot at signing up. Since the VPE is one of the people notified between meetings, any issues with people dropping roles can be handled effectively.

Lastly, my club has a couple of backup speaker slots in our agendas that we encourage people to sign up for. These are people that are on standby in case a speaker drops out from speaking role. I set those backup speaker roles as zero duration roles that are non-printing and non-speaker roles that can be signed up for... They are just placeholders for people to sign up and they do not count for any thing once the meeting has started, and therefore we do not include them on the printed agenda or in speech reports. If we actually need one of those backup speakers, we would move their name from the backup speaker role to a full speaker role in the agenda.

Goes to show how different people's environments are. Going two or three meetings ahead would be unheard of for us. Many of our members get called to meetings or out-of-town work or business crunches and everything happens on a short time frame.