Wonderful. Thanks everyone for joining. Thanks, Liz, for the intro, and thanks, Belle, for reassuring me this is a chill space. Expectations be damned. I said earlier before the recording started that, I've noticed people's tolerance and and good graces and general, attitudes about punctuality have become extremely inelastic, rigid, and fussy under a pandemic five years in now, which is normal. Fine. You know, we don't have a lot of, kindness on

it's hard to hard to keep dishing it out, without receiving much in the back. This is a short talk about what are meetings, and I'm gonna do my best to give a little general theory. I'm gonna share a little syllabus, and I'm gonna have everybody, share a little bit of what they've been up to lately. If it's possible to, chime in with some things we've been reading, we'll get to that later. But, before we also started recording, I asked where was was the last bad meeting you were in, and what made it so bad? And I ask this because there's a lot that we can learn from in our own experiences, especially when we study them together. And so I'm gonna read just one anonymously. This morning, I helped chaperone bike to school at my kid's school. Most of my bad meetings involve some people talking too much and other people talking too little. So it's nice to have the contrast of how our mornings were and then some meetings in general. If only a meeting was more biking or our kids to school and less Zooming. Another I'll read off. Calling

from

oh, I don't know Georgian places. Anyway, the, I believe, capital of Georgia. Spent my morning sitting Georgian and actually had it a very enjoyable meeting. The last bad meeting I love when people transliterate or write their their actual verbiage or whatever you'd call that expressions. The last bad meeting, conflicting ideas about what we were meeting about in the first place. Happy to be in this meta meeting. How appropriate for metagov. Okay. And then one last one. Hi, all. Last bed meeting went off the rails, like my subway this morning almost, because the facilitator let a couple folks dominate and get way off topic. And I wanted to add that one at the end because what is modern modernity or modern life?

Okay. Bonus. This just came in the chat. Last bad meeting. The SF, San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting, whereas San Francisco Police Department were trying to explain their overtime abuse. Overtime pay for police officers has become, I think, something like $91,000,000 in over overrun costs or cost overruns or what have you. Life in America, for those of you who aren't here, every city is getting all the damn money they want for cops and complaining about it at the same time, the cops. So meetings, all kinds. This is a zine launch for a syllabus. I guess I should say the zine is a syllabus, and it was based off of a learning club and reading group, a place called Bathers Library that's based in Oakland. I I'm gonna share with you a little sneak preview of the zine, and then we're gonna have some open chat.

Alright. The reason I did this learning club, and I hope this is a little dose of inspiration for you all to to borrow, is there was a book I knew about that I always referenced because the title is just so appropriate. I love I'm a sociologist by trade, and I I love the sort of poetic opportunities you get every so often to give a really good title or to really name a phenomenon based on people's way of describing it. And so this woman, Francesca Paletta, a professor of sociology, wrote a book about the civil rights era, and the free speech movement and women's liberation and consciousness raising in the sort of, let's call it thirties to seventies in The U. S. You know, because these things have long origin stories. The name of the book is Freedom is an Endless Meeting. And I love the title. I never read the book, but I would go around and be like, oh, this book is that, that, that, that, you know, and I like knew just a few bits, but I said, okay, I gotta read this book finally. And I said that in specific because this person, Justin Carter, who runs this this community space, you can see the photo behind this ad is a little sneak preview of it, was opening a, what he called a low cost art school for freaks. And it's basically just a big room in Oakland with lots of books. And they had, open call for reading groups, learning clubs, whatever you want to do for a few weeks or a few months. And I thought I would organize this learning club to read this book with other people because I had not it felt so antithetical to read a book fundamentally about this building block of democracy or democratic ways of life, let's say, by myself. So I pitched this. It was one of the few classes that got offered this past year, this past fall. And I also, for those of you who are ancient, enough may remember 30 Rock, which was a comedy on running on, I don't know, five or six years maybe with Alec Baldwin and others, who's a cliche of an executive in a combination TV network and microwave, oven manufacturer. And he subscribed to Meetings magazine. He was always going on about it and how effective he was at everything. So meetings are a weird sort of set of spectrums from civil rights era meetings to corporate garbage where you're talking about TV programming and microwave ovens. And that's what we talked about, the whole range of things. It was 12 people, and no one knew each other, which was really wild because it was, again, this low cost art school for freaks. People signed up to just show up and see what happened. And so I'm gonna give you now the the general theory of meetings that we came up with and then a sneak preview of the contents, and then we'll get into some chit chat. The sort of shorthand and also the subtitle for this zine is how do we want to be together? That I think explains a lot of what a meeting is or could be. And the be together, not to get too philosophical, and there's a lot of traditions of what it means to be. You may be in a meeting like I was where your project manager was a former weapons contractor, middle manager, who loves to watch flight traffic over Los Angeles Airport on a second monitor and tell you about planes going in and out before you get to the thing he forced you to do, which is give a status update on stuff that's way too complex and in motion to summarize into a few words, while he fussily insists that you stay on his agenda to break your flow of deep work on extremely complex data collection and analysis about worker ownership in California for low wage sectors and job quality and firm performance results that ended up being three fourteen pages. And this guy who doesn't know academic work, he, again, worked at Lockheed Martin until recently, is trying to drag you through his agenda to make, I suppose, some form of job security and sense of purpose in the world. He's a nice guy. But how he wanted to be together with me was not how I wanted to be together with him. And that's just two people. Other times, we have Medigov, which I love, and I encourage you all to check out the Slack community. One of the few Slack communities after a pandemic rolling that still has positivity and levity and intrigue and substance. And there's many other kinds of meetings we talked about in our four weeks together of this session, but, you know, all kinds of meetings I think this general theory might apply to. Sorry for the little grammar roller coaster. So here's what we ended up getting into in the contents. I just want to appreciate a couple of comments coming up, and maybe I'll pause here briefly before we get into the the big reveal of the contents. Christy and Jonathan and Gavin and Bee had a few comments. And folks other the folks may have some stuff bubbling up. So let's pause for about three, four minutes to take one or two comments or expressions since we haven't had that yet, and I've been rattling on for about fifteen minutes. So anyone who's been chatting in the chat or who's been chatting their heads, when I come on mic and say something out loud, I would welcome welcome a few, few contributions. It's open open mic, open open floor.

I'll just

Go for it.

Quickly, if I may. I'm I'm currently enrolled at a community college, which is an amazing mix of retirees, the unemployed, recent recently discharged veterans, 19 year olds, and literal high schoolers. And so we've made the one of our clubs, we've made the absolute youngest member president. I mean, we elected him. And it's which is fantastic. He but also, you know, he there's, like, a lot of skills missing. So our last worst meeting was just somebody else presided, and he didn't, you know, he didn't entitle himself to preside. I don't think that he even it even occurred to him that he should be preside that presiding is what a president does. Thanks.

I'll confess that that conjugation of president and presiding just was new to me to you in this very moment. You can raise your hand as Val said if you'd like to get on Stack, so called. Another, bit of jargon for getting in the queue or the line for chatting, or you can just get on mic. Equal opportunity, I suppose. Go ahead,

Christy, you wanna go next?

I'll, we'll jump in.

Yeah. And then I think Steve raised a hand. Am I right? So go ahead and answer

It's alright. Sorry. Keep rolling.

Okay. I'll I'll be quick. I'll I'll mention, very background and and lots of things that have, touched on governance and and and certainly been to my share meetings. And and, honestly, I you know, full transparency, I went through a a layoff, about a month ago and have been using that opportunity to really dive into some of the projects and learnings that that I've been waiting to to get a chance to do, and this is one of those. But I'm here today almost in a whimsical way because I found myself missing Zoom meetings in a weird way. Like, without the structure of some of those some meetings, even the boring ones, even the redundant ones, there is a certain type of work signaling or something that it that it gives to psychologically give gives to me a little bit. So I kinda wanted to tap in just to get some social, you know, scheduling back into my life a little bit. And the the the topic couldn't have been more appropriate. So I'm I'm enjoying kind of in in this meta sense, kind of the the structure of of what this is all about. So thank you for having me.

Really appreciate that. Let's let's see who else would like to share. We don't have to, because I see a little more to, present. But I think Steve raised a hand. And if anyone, I'd like to try to tip the balance or or sort of reweight the scale. If there's anyone who's like, maybe I should share something, but not red, maybe not because what take this as an invitation to to try if you'd like and you were hesitant. Literally be my guest, be our guest to to contribute something if you don't typically get chance to. So Steve and then did I see a hand? Yes. Okay. Steve, then Drew, then we'll we'll keep powering on.

Actually, I think I was only just Vicky and an okay sign because I was really Never mind. Steve's, you know, glasses retainer. This is it's like a, you know, a a yarn glass. It's really fantastic. I was

I could try and make something like that for myself that looks awesome. Fantastic. And I do just wanna hear what your what the this process up. Because I could talk your ear about this stuff for for hours with specific solutions, but

Great.

I don't I don't wanna do that. I wanna hear.

Okay. We've got I'll just two things. Christy, your your so called what did someone call it? Granny chain. Yeah. If there's a I'd like to verbally say the chat, we will and should use as a space for kinds of community announcements. So folks have any requests, like I just left a job or the job left me, or folks are like I have a new pattern for knitting a granny chain for my glasses. Maybe that's what you actually need, Mark. It was something for your glasses, and maybe, Christy, you're trying to hire someone. Anyway, so please use the chat for requests and offers of all kinds. The magic of sort of parallel play here for talking and typing. We'll let that run throughout the the whole. And then as for Pat Khan, who just joined the prompt, the prompt for folks introducing themselves, and I think a few folks may have joined in addition. Where you're coming from, and when was the last bad meeting you were in? What made it so bad? Although just now, we were kinda free form, you know, sharing other comments about our space. So, feel free to use the chat for requests and offers of all kind. Feel free to introduce you if you haven't yet. And then, Drew, sign in a bit, and then we'll get back to sharing the big reveal for this zine and syllabus.

Yeah. Obligation. That's that's an uncomfortable one to reckon with, especially being a member of society and trying to suss out what we can and cannot be part of. Alright. So that might be a nice, provocation of a sort to get into the guts of this, scene. So, again, for folks who may have just joined previous to seeing this, this is the cover page. You're gonna be able to see the digital and print version in a hot sec. And the subtitle, again, was How Do We Want to Be Together? That came out of this, four week learning club. And what I'm trying to do is, in presenting this, give you all a, a tangible feel for what we did. So you might even try to do one of these yourselves. That's why it's a syllabus. You can, you know, hack it, fork it, adapt it, adopt it, however you like, mix and match, draw from just the readings. We'll get into them in a sec. Alright. The contents. There was a general theory, like I shared a second ago. There's a little more in that inside the cover page. But the structure and flow of the first meeting was a a bit specific, and then the next CU meetings, the next three meetings was based on that. And then there's a list of all the reading material we gathered. In the first meeting, what we did was ask everyone when was the last bad meeting you had? What was it like? What made it so bad for you? And we had small groups of as told Shue earlier, there was 12 people who came together, and then there were groups of three or four that chatted about bad meetings of all kinds. And the the group was stun stunningly diverse. I know this is not easy to recreate, but like I mentioned, it was 12 people who didn't know each other. There was a woman who was a nurse and a union member. There was a woman who does textile engineering. There was a woman who does political canvassing and, like, door knocking and coordinating field field outreach, if you will, field campaigns. There was a woman who does disaster preparedness plus plus plus all kinds of other resilience and ecology work. And so we all had a variety of meetings to draw from and a variety of experiences that were quite contrasting. And we shared all these sticky notes based on our few minutes of talking through what our bad meetings were. If you if you can see it and you have to squint a little, we had a bunch of items in here, and then we had a bunch of themes in yellow, like, no goal, no agenda, or it felt high conflict, or there was no good facilitation. But they're also more juicy stuff like Let me see if I can squint and read one of these. Embarrassing. There's a picture of a pumpkin for some reason. You know? And other more somatic things like bad acoustics. Right? So I think Zoom has actually gotten really good lately because it cancels out passing police sirens, which we can only cancel that out more realistically. But we took this set of themes that bubbled up from this first session where we all shared a little bit about bad meetings, and then we used that to sort of pivot or maybe pirouette into, okay, these are some themes that matter to us. The next three meetings are going to be taking up the three topics in order of what felt most palpable and most pressing. So the rest of the zine after that is a set of agendas, roughly, and a little bit of commentary of what happened for those three subsequent meetings. The first one was about objectives and procedures, goals, agendas, the whole hidden caboodle that you might typically associate with a somewhat corporate, somewhat production oriented context. Then it was feelings and relationships, which was a radical departure where we used dialogue by David Baum, which is a hyper identity forward, conflict prone space in which you try to just be together. You try to suspend some of the principles of a of a typical meeting. You suspend judgment of all kinds, and it's really hard to do. The person who facilitated it was a a former Occupy Oakland organizer and a real old head in terms of a lot of different labor and solidarity movement struggles and felt like it was a therapeutic move for him. So, you know, as I said, quite a contrast from the corporate objectives, procedures, and so on. And then the last one was about materiality and embodiment. So I mentioned a moment ago, acoustics. Or, you know, the seating. Or as said a moment ago, just, you know, it's nice to be in a Zoom call again when Mark was sharing that getting back into a schedule. Oops. Hold on. And there's more obviously, like I said, there's commentary and agendas for these three subsequent meetings in the Zine. But I'm gonna actually kind of clickety click. One sec. So we're gonna talk about what we're reading lately, next, in relation to this. Because I thought it occurred to us, as this was a reading group slash learning club, the thing that we didn't do much of during and kind of before or after was actually the readings. There was a lot of reading material I I organized. But reading is, in the many ways, you know, an opposite or a sharp contrast from a regular meeting. Because when you're in a meeting with folks, you wanna be in dialogue or you wanna be observing each other or collaborating with your sleeves rolled up on something. And reading is relatively solitary practice by by, you know, more mechanical, kind of reality than than conceptual. Right? Like, you have to read a page and it's if you read with a a friend or loved one side by side, but you're still photons shooting into your own eyes and your brain is trying to make sense of them, you know, or whatever accessibility means through which you get to read. So we'll talk about what we've been reading lately, because indeed that does call up a lot of fun things and kind of smash categories together. But I want to also share what we had for our readings here. And, also, as this meeting itself is an invite to not just get the syllabus, but to contribute, you know, buy, borrow, steal, share back, donate, what have you, materials to this shared drive we have. So I'm gonna take just two minutes to summarize a few of the the essential readings that really underpinned the the four meetings we had. Because, again, as I said a moment ago, my hope is that you all can find some way to take the whole thing or pieces thereof and repurpose this learning club for your own with some folks you know, some parenting groups, some neighborhood groups, some community college peers, whatever. So I'm gonna flag a few readings here, and then we'll open up the floor for what you've been reading lately. Sorry to be redundant. I've had a lot of different weird pedagogy experiences, and I've and I got a bias for repetitiveness. Okay. My favorite readings, and I thought the ones that were most instructive and most, useful. Obviously, the first one, freedom is an endless meeting, as I mentioned, was an inspiration for the thing in the first place. That goes into all kinds of really high stakes organizing meetings in the civil rights and free speech and women's liberation, those consciousness reading movements of the past century. And it's just really well written. It's ethnographic interviews, archival research with a lot of these elders now who have done scary new stuff in a context that was rather unsympathetic to building power and eventually, hopefully, changing some laws that won't get changed back. The participant briefly is a sort of anthropological review of four kinds of participation, which I know a lot of us in governance nerd circles think participation is super great, and it is often. But this goes into going native tourism, which was big in the eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties. Not awesome actually, it turns out, but being a participant in different ways can be kinda awkward. Then talks about LBJ's, urban renewal in Philadelphia, one of the most racist urban planning schemes, but incredibly, incredibly participatory. Excellent meetings. Technically, on paper, the most dynamic civic innovation you've ever seen, stuff that I haven't seen as well performed in the last few years or last few decades of, like, younger people, I guess, you know, since the sixties, getting into, like, trying to make urban places great and nice. But again, super fucking racist. Excuse me. And then I wanted to focus on two others that are less, let's say, subject matter dense and more tactical and brief. So those are books. There's another one by this person, Cam Daigle. They're a product designer in a corporate software company. Cam talks about three kinds of meetings. There's the status meeting, which is read only, report out, just straight text or words out to folks, stand up sometimes people call it. Then Cam argues there's a feedback meeting where people are giving feedback when it's been presented. And then third, there's a decision making meeting. Decision making is, as you can imagine, where you deliberate and you try to choose amongst options and look at scenario. No, no, no, no, no. What we did with that for the second meeting was we choreographed and performed, and this isn't the zine, those three meetings in order. So we asked for folks to give feedback or to to do a status update on how this learning club was going, just two meetings in. That got really uncomfortable because people felt an urge to start giving feedback, and so that broke into the second kind of meeting where people are like, yeah. Well, you know, I felt like we haven't had enough embodiment here, and I don't really know everyone. I heard there's a nurse and a textile engineer and so then feedback got going, and people wanted to learn more about each other and maybe experiment with different formats. And then that eventually broke into the third kind of meeting, which was a decision making. And that end of that hour and a half, we decided together to do a radically different kind of meeting for the third meeting, which was a dialogue. And that's this, down here, an excerpt from this book by David Baum on a very difficult to perform kind of space in which you talk about your identities and you seek contrast between identities, not production obligations or your roles, your responsibilities, your material interests even, which maybe a sort of Marxist bias would would have you name that. But, you know and then the final meeting was based on this relatively obscure short story called, Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby. It's about two pages, and it's kind of an absurdist short story from the seventies that I'm not gonna get into. And we talked about it, and we talked about how it felt and what we did with it.

And then we had cake

at the end. So those are just a selection of meetings. All of them I thought were really rich. I selected, I think, the first five or six, excuse me. And then folks co facilitated the second, third and fourth meetings, and they brought these other readings, good documentation practices on dialogue, some of us had been threatening a friend Colby, and meetings as performance art. So now I want to hear, by way of sharing more about what you think about meetings and what you think about or feel about this kind of learning experience, let's take some time first in the chat to give folks some space to process what have you been reading lately in relation to meetings or absolutely not in relation to meetings that is giving you some satisfaction. And the implicit obvious invitation here is to share them not just in the chat, but maybe we'll share them in this shared drive. So, yes, please, first in the chat for about two minutes. We'll have quiet time to share and type out what you've been reading lately, maybe drop some links. And then we'll change it up for open mic so folks can speak to it. This this way, folks, as I said, get a little chance to process and think about what's what they've been reading lately. And maybe if you're listening to people talk live like me going on too long, it's hard to do so. Okay. So I'll keep time for two minutes. So quarter of. Type in the chat what you've been reading lately. Feel free to drop as many links as you like. We'll get on mic, and then we'll tie it off with, some final final content from the scene. I'll let this go for one more minute because I said two, but folks keep sharing rich things, and I know it takes time to think and type for everyone to one more minute. Share what's on your reading list lately if it's been giving you some kind of satisfaction, and we'll bring this to a close. K. So one more minute. I'd like to also now open up space if anyone wants to speak to something they've been reading lately. Let's, have a be judicious, think about the collective here. If you don't usually get a chance to speak, or think out loud, and you'd like to, this is your invitation. And if you tend to do that often, and you feel all too willing and able, think of this as an opportunity to hear someone that you might not have otherwise gotten to meet. So is anyone here like to speak to something they've been reading, maybe have not typed it out, or if you have, but still you wanna speak to it because you feel strongly and you'd like to take the invitation. Off mic and go for it, or raise your hand if you prefer. Either one.

I can speak to what I shared because, I I was like, oh, I haven't done any readings about meetings. But then I remembered this podcast that I just listened to, like, yesterday. It's, David Bollier, like, something about the commons. He's a well known, like, commons guy. But it's all about artist collectives, and it was basically, like I mean, they interviewed artist collectives in Iran, in Latin America, and then I forget where else. I think somewhere in Europe, maybe in Germany. So he kind of went around the world interviewing artist collectives, and it was like, meetings are all that they had. Like, a couple of them were just saying that, you know, they don't have a lot of money. They don't have a lot of resources to share, but that, like, the meetings are actually the place, like, the only place the only thing that these collectives have, and it's where it's because of the meetings that these artists are able to do things, make art together. Like, at the meeting was where, you know, they were able to say, okay. We're gonna make this movie. We don't have any money, but we're still gonna make the movie. We're gonna use your phone. We're gonna use your mom's house, and we're gonna use, you know, you're gonna act in it. And it was, like, without the meeting, they would not have been able to make the film, and they made, like, full feature film. So, yeah, I think I don't know. Just the power of gathering, especially for folks that don't have a lot of other resources, that can be the the shared resource. The the comments is the meeting or the meeting is the comments.

Did

Oh, yes. Your turn.

Oh, my fault. Go

Of collaborating. I just took some notes for you, Artem, so put it in the chat. Okay. We've got a little less than six minutes left. I'm gonna take us to close. Whoops. What just happened? There it is. We had cake at the end, as I mentioned. There's cake at the end here too. So you all gonna piece your eyes on, this, I think, relatively gorgeous color palette of, bake some vegan because, you know, something for everyone. And I'm also gonna share with you some more goodies. There is in the chat, the Bathers Library, for those of you who are in the broader Bay Area or you ever come and visit, is here. Christy is running a class, lots of people do. It's a lovely art space, and they have events too. It's not just a low cost art school for freaks. It's also a place downtown Oakland that has all kinds of, mostly poetry and other literary or language stuff. But, you know, once in a while, some other some other events, book talks, and this sort of thing too. There's also this zine that we put out, so you can purchase a hard copy from Bathers Library if you'd like. Oh, I'm on I'm on the thing about Zoom, is that you have this bizarre, how do you call it, a canceling out or green screen effect. So I'm holding the zine. You all can't quite see it, but there. That's what it looks like. And it's a lithograph sorry. A risograph print. There's the cover, and you've got the QR code to like, smash it against my face so you can see it, to, scan and add your own readings. And there's a quote on the back I wanna read to you all. Oh my god. Okay. Let's let's try this. This is so tiring. I joined in part because I really fucking and but wait. I really fucking hate meetings deep in my bones. But also, unfortunately for me, my politics sort of fall on the side of endless meetings. So it was somewhat therapeutic to explore that razor's edge. This is from a tenant rights lawyer who was one of the participants. And, yeah, I also fucking hate meetings, but sometimes they're gorgeous and ways to I think Val shared in that anecdote, a place to meet people and think of things. And so we had a little itty bitty opportunity to share some readings. I'm gonna also share with you the digital copy of the zine since you're all here and some of you may be far away. If you do wanna purchase it, it helps support Baker's Library, this low cost art school for freaks. Come and visit. But, I'm gonna share with you also a copy of the digital zine in the chat, and then I'm gonna send out after the fact a little thank you note through all the RSVPs, and you'll be able to get some of these links as well. And then finally, what I wanted to say is this Medigov community, some of you don't know it, some of you are new to it. You've met Liz earlier on. I do suggest you check out medigov.org. It's really lovely. It's a lovely Slack community, one of the few that I've been in out of, like, maybe a dozen. I'm sure you all have a similar sort of life cycle or sort of a half life of seeing Zoom and sort of signaled group chat and Slack spaces really give you social life during the early days of pandemic, and some of them have sorta ebbed. But, MediGov is a great great Slack community and has seminars every Wednesday, almost every Wednesday, like this one, although different kinds. I'm trying to paste the link to the digital copy, and then I'm gonna say goodbye. Give us a few minutes of breathing room before whatever we have next at the tyranny of the hour. There it is. Shoot. Wait. Didn't paste. So sorry. Well, while I try to get that link, does anyone wanna have the last word? Anyone who hasn't had a chance to say anything yet or feels like they just wanna effervesce in the chat. Please, you know, type anything you want to say on the way out, but also come on mic if you want to say anything just to tie us off at the end. Verbal or nonverbal? All forms of communication welcome to tie us off here.

say with you, Danny? Sorry.

Best way to keep in touch with me, you can email me at this email address. I have to go. And, that's also in the the syllabus, so you can find my You're off

of the on Slack. Okay. You're generally not on Slack.

I mean No. Okay. There was one other person who shared, and then let's let's call it a night.

Thank you, Eddie. Thanks, everyone. Eddie, you have a great microphone set up, whatever it is. So thanks for adding on that excellent audio note. Speaking of embodiment materiality, I'm really glad everyone stayed. We have a few seconds left before the hour, the tyranny of these these things being with the air. So let's say goodbye. Goodbye, everyone. I'm so glad we had this time together. I hope you all stay in touch. Check out MediGov. Join the Slack. The chat will come around. Spot your emails, and have a wonderful rest of your week. Take good care. Bye bye.

Danny. Bye

bye. Thank

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Adios.