Robert’s Rules Suck: Why We Can’t Make Change Until We Change the System | Hacker News Reader

Robert’s Rules Suck: Why We Can’t Make Change Until We Change the System

aninjusticemag.com

28 pointssep_field35 comments

Having served on a public body "governed" by Robert's Rules, there's one very important aspect of Robert's Rules that the author seems to be overlooking. While the default case certainly does constrain brainstorming, that is not a necessary case. Robert's Rules contains, at the very least, provisions for suspending or altering the rules temporarily for just this sort of reason.

I can't count the number of times the body I served on did just this. Admittedly, this was before COVID and the ensuing discussions were easier to manage in a live, in-person, format, regardless, Robert's Rules does allow for it.

As for public meeting's law, I can only speak for Illinois' Open Meetings Act, but yes, in fact, even email can be considered a meeting in some cases. In Illinois, what constitutes a meeting is a little more limiting. According to the OMA, a meeting occurs when a majority of quorum is present. In the 30 member instance discussed in the article, that's only 8 members (one half quorum plus one); In the case of our 8 member board, that was only 3.

Now, I understand the author's frustration, but these sunshine laws are important in keeping the public's business public, so, as frustrating as it may seem, these should not be relaxed.

"There is no place to form ideas in the public meeting. Members are expected to bring ideas, pre-fabricated, and see how they hold up to a vote."

That is the intended outcome. Robert's Rules are intended to facilitate decision making. Robert's Rules are not intended to facilitate ideation.

The misapplication of public records laws -- being instructed to not communicate with other members of the committee seems to be the core issue.

Lost me at this point: Robert’s Rules of Order and the general meeting protocols really do fall right in line with what we know about white supremacist culture.

I'm so tired of hearing everything being about white supremacy. The latest was the attack on an elderly Chinese man by a young black man...all because, yep white supremacy.

Robert's Rules of Order may not be the best format, but neither is everyone shouting and whoever gets the loudest wins. It maintains the American culture that has been built for the last 250 years and while it's not perfect, it is far from being a place where only whites thrive.

Yeah, that also struck me as more of arising from an "antagonistic, competitive" culture vs a collaborative/cooperative one.

And as Facebook shows, "everyone shouting and whoever gets the loudest wins[1]" definitely sucks too. Though I wouldn't be surprised if there were at least some lessons from the creation / history of RRoO that could actually translate.

[1] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-shouting-clas...

> It maintains the American culture that has been built for the last 250 years and while it's not perfect, it is far from being a place where only whites thrive.

Can you please identify the time periods where a plurality of races where thriving in America?

The way I see it, until the 1980s, non-whites were made unwelcome in America.

Segregation occurred within our lifetimes. President Biden for example took his seat in Congress, during an era where 8 year old black girls could be stoned by the KKK for going to a mixed-race school. Nearly 40 years later, he left Congress to serve under a mixed-race President in the Whitehouse.

We have seen a sea of change, but the time spans involved are very small. For most of US history, being anything but lily white was a demerit against you that most people could never overcome. US culture is not merely white culture. It includes the culture of many peoples who suffered under the oppression of segregation, Jim Crow, internment camps, dying in a trail of tears, slavery and 2nd class citizenship.

I mean, that's how most people see it. The novel (and extreme) claim here is that things like turn taking and facilitation are white supremacist. You can't just explain by saying "well in my opinion the KKK used to lynch black girls".

The above poster said US culture is "far from being a place where only whites thrive".

I was pointing out that a culture where the stoning of children of colour is normalized is not 'thriving' for them.

Remember we're talking about history not the present day.

As for the article itself, I don't think the idea that Robert's Rules supports white supremacy holds any weight. The author essentially said that it helps those in power as they control the discussion, which is true, and implies that those in power are white supremacists. The later is arguable. I'd say it was most definitely true in the past (Jim Crow laws were wildly popular when first proposed), but not true currently.

One could argue that when seen from a macro world view that any specific race is thriving more in the US than in other countries around the world. This doesn't mean that the US is truly fair and we have come a long way in the last 40 years and still have a way to go.

Many people of color immigrated here in the 1980s and while we still hear that they have been held back from succeeding they are probably still doing significantly better on average than if they had stayed in their home countries where violence and poverty still run rampant.

If the US is so unfair to people of color and not provide a way to better their lives...why do they continue to immigrate?

I specifically said that the US was not welcoming until the 1980s.

So I think we're in agreement? The US currently is a good place for people of color. The same couldn't be said for the US in the past.

Additionally, I believe there are studies showing that immigrants always do significantly better than those of a similar socioeconomic group in their home countries because immigrants are self-selected group who sought out better opportunities and often dedicate themselves to bettering their own lives. It's a little bit of nuance, but I think its important since so often people (not you!) stereotype immigrants as part of the 'tired, poor, huddled masses' when in the modern era due to statutory requirements to get a VISA, immigrants are not the bottom most of any society.

(For those who didn't read all the way, the author suggests replacing overly rigid parliamentarian rules with Agile methodology)

Corporate ideation and decision making processes in general, and certainly this includes Agile, prioritize producing the best outcome with the least energy and don't place any intrinsic value on making sure that people are represented, so they are probably not the best fit for democratic governence.

For a discussion of why fluidity and informality in process can be problematic, the seminal essay is The Tyranny of Structurelessness (https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm).

It sounds like the structure that the city council committee is using here doesn't work. But the author is wrong to expect a truly inclusive democratic process to feel good. It goes against our nature as social beings, will be unpleasant, and require a ton of additional effort to get a similar quality result compared to a more natural process.

Yeah, I thought the promotion of Agile was pretty lame in this context. But overall still thought the article was thought provoking and had some good points that would make an interesting discussion here.

In general, an incoherent, racist screed does not provoke thought so much as it does contempt.

Hence why this article was flagged.

You don't have a clue what racism is. Go back into your cave.

We've experimented with automated timekeeping in our team's meetings, which I guess are "agile" or at least relatively unstructured. Everyone can see how much time everyone else has been speaking, and a little unobtrusive note pops up on your screen if you've been speaking for a long time without a break.

I think it's been good: everyone makes an extra effort not to interrupt the less outgoing people when they speak. Some outgoing people on my team commented that they didn't realize how much they dominated the conversation before. Best of all, a couple meetings don't need to happen anymore because it turns out that 1-3 people did all the talking and the others were just showing up because they thought it was expected of them.

this sounds cool! what are you using for the automatic timekeeping?

I not qualified to comment on most of this article but I vehemently disagree with that statement:

  The very idea that speaking individually, in turn, is the best way to go implies valuing individualism over collective values.

I really don't understand how respecting everyone time and speech is a sign of valuing individualism over collectivism. When I was in college, there were openly marxist students organization that used the "code morin", a derivative of Robert's Rules tailored to the francophone context. If marxists can use a derivative of those rules they cannot be that biased towards individualism.

Allowing every participant a set amount of time to speak during each motion, no matter whether they are engaged with the motion, is individualist. It's most often abused by individuals seeking to filibuster the later motions on the agenda, against the democratic will of the group.

An alternative would be that points for and against a motion could be agreed collectively in advance of the formal decision-making meeting, and communicated in a way which does not interrupt the voting session. A system which worked like that would potentially be much more respectful to everyone's time (since everyone doesn't have to sit through one rogue senator's bullshit).

A successful filibuster (in organizations where that is allowed) generally requires either UNlimited speaking time, a group of opponents (not one individual), or both. Generally it's both.

Classic filibusters aren't really possible under the current edition of Robert's Rules of Order, which include the following:

1) No one can speak at one time more than 10 minutes. 2) Anyone who has not spoken gets to speak before anyone who has already spoken. 3) No one is permitted to speak a third time to a motion.

You seem to be saying that, within that version of the rules, an individual has a right to speak to every single motion for 20 minutes.

If you have four motions on the agenda and an hour to cover them, that single person can comfortably guarantee that we ain't hearing the fourth motion.

That would be untenable for local community organisations that I have been a part of. Every such org has that one individual member (and their pals) who would rather raze it to the ground than not get their way.

> If you have four motions on the agenda and an hour to cover them

Then the meeting goes for an hour and 20 minutes instead. Happens all the time.

Or the fourth motion is the first order of business at the next meeting. Or...

> Then the meeting goes for an hour and 20 minutes instead. Happens all the time.

My original comment was objecting to the parent claim that this is respectful of people's time.

That's interesting, because the marxist, separatist, feminist utopias of the 1960s, which valued the collective above all else, followed this form of speaking. A stick would be passed around the group, and the person holding the stick was the only one allowed to speak until they wished to pass the stick. What would you say to them?

It's the same basic idea: you take turns to speak, rather than all trying to speak at once or the person with the loudest voice simply talking over everyone else.

In the context you describe it sounds like they had not had to deal with someone who loves the sound of their own voice and wanted to talk for an hour about how great their home business is and they think everyone should join in their ground level opportunity.

It's a great approach if it worked for them; protest and activist groups started with that approach but have changed their processes because of the problems mentioned by the sibling post.

People interested in this topic may like the book Direct Action (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2331-direct-action) on the history of protest movements.

Given that talking sticks are an historic Native American concept (my search led to the relevant Wikipedia page), I read this comment to somewhat corroborate the article's claim that white supremacy is relevant to meeting rules.

> That's interesting, because the marxist, separatist, feminist utopias of the 1960s, which valued the collective above all else, followed this form of speaking. A stick would be passed around the group, and the person holding the stick was the only one allowed to speak until they wished to pass the stick.

AFAIK, that was most true when those organizations were in the “forming” stages as part of the shared process of building and getting buy-in on a new community, but generally faded in the groups with any longevity either through formal abandonment or because informal norms governing surrender of the stick evolved as groups matured.

> ...I joined an ad hoc committee formed by our city council to address police policy.

"We'll form a citizens' committee to discuss this and present recommendations" in municipal politics is a polite way of saying "we're not going to do anything about this issue". The committee is not intended to "work" in any meaningful sense.

Maybe they'd be better off self-organizing and presenting fully thought-out recommendations to the city, although the city would more easily get away with totally ignoring their recommendations in that case.

The first half of this is a complaint that public policy discussions are meant to be public, rather than rubber-stamping decisions made by insiders behind closed doors. I am not inspired.

A bit reductive, the point the author makes about how what's able to be stored for the public record greatly reduces the functionality of the medium they're meeting over. The fact the chat transcript, or emote usage can't be stored with time stamps seems like a misstep on zoom's part. Perhaps stored as closed captions?

It's a citizens' committee making non-binding recommendations... I don't know if the entirety of their internal communication needs to be livestreamed and recorded.

The actual debate by decision-makers will be in a public council anyway, and if the recommendations don't stand on their own merits then they won't get implemented.

One of the reasons RROO survives is that it's a practical means to manage conflict within meetings, and, in theory, resolve issues with process. "Brainstorming", as he describes it, is a co-operative activity (I think so are the rest of the methods he mentions); not all meetings can be assumed to be co-operative affairs, especially over time and with access to people who don't share communal values.

When the Occupy movement was inhabiting public spaces, many of them featured regular general assemblies where they were careful to allow everyone a chance to address the crowd. At first it was a beautiful moment of participation by all; over time it became a haranguing session by the loudest and most long-winded--the quiet voices, the vulnerable voices, stopped attending and participating because the meetings became dominated by the domineering, as usually happens. And the organizers, eschewing rules and format, had no means to keep the assemblies to their original purpose, which basically dissolved.

Every community, every activity, needs some means of protecting its core so that it can continue, and if it doesn't come down to naked power, then it usually comes down to rules that provide continuity.

Robert's Rules of Order ensure that everyone has a chance to speak, and make it difficult to bully people or shout them down.

I fail to see why these things are bad, much less "white supremacy".

And, predictably, this starts getting modded down.

Classic HN.

http://archive.is/i9Wij

The author views these rules as upholding white supremacy because someone needs to make decisions about cutting off speakers or allowing extensions of time to speak. The author extends from that to assume that taking turns in speaking necessarily means that people from cultures who value patience and humility do not get to speak.

> In terms of conflict resolution, what if we stopped having debates or hearings in which people “claim their time” in order to see how scathing a blow they can deal out?

This is basically blaming Robert's Rules for people being rude and inconsiderate to their community. You're not going to fix that through any process, however informal that process is. At some point someone is going to have to tell the holocaust denier to sit down and shut up because this meeting is about turning King street from a road with pedestrian access into a pedestrian mall with vehicle access.

Sitting around the table and talking in informal turns works okay if you're Jada Pinkett Smith and a bunch of like-minded allies. I'll not a recent study claiming that women are more likely to ask questions, and more questions will be asked, if the first person to ask a question is a woman, and put that alongside the Jada Pinket Smith panel being all women of colour. This model falls flat on its face if the first person to speak is the town sex pest labelling all women a tool of the devil, and all the women in the audience give up and go home.

> For instance, while writing this, I was awaiting the results of a Doodle poll for the meeting of a subcommittee that I am serving on. When I hadn’t heard confirmation, I checked in and was informed that the meeting is being postponed because the Police Chief couldn’t make it … He has been invited (by the facilitation team I will point out, no one asked me) as a consulting expert. I don’t mind him being invited and giving us answers to questions we might have, but the fact that they cancelled the meeting because he couldn’t be there speaks volumes about who really has a seat at the table.

There's a lot more that's going on here than "Robert's Rules are white supremacist," most notably that there is clearly some breakdown in communications because someone along the chain is using multiple modes of communication and not repeating communications from one mode across the other modes.

It's vitally important that if you're organising meetings with people who correspond with you via Twitter, Email, SMS or face to face, that you repeat all incoming communications to all outgoing channels (even if only in summary form). In this case for example it was clear that the meeting agenda had not been communicated otherwise the author would know that the Police Chief was speaking as a consulting expert.

To me the act of suggesting that cancelling a meeting due to the invited speaker not being available is because of "who really has a seat at the table" is itself inherently white individualist and selfish ("the meeting was cancelled because of someone who is not me, that makes me not important"), considering that the meeting was clearly about consulting with this expert.

Good grief I could go on for days about the ways that some people seem to desire to find racism everywhere. The racism here isn't in the system, it's in the people who use whatever system is available to prop themselves up.

Casual talks over coffee and cake work only when the people involved can be polite to each other. It is not a failure of Robert's Rules that leads to white supremacy, it's white supremacy that uses any system to get its way.

I'll just drop in here a summary of Tema Okun's characteristics of white supremacy (which to me reads like a list of characteristics of any oppressive culture) that was mentioned in this article:

- perfectionism

- sense of urgency (no time to digest, demand that we act right now)

- defensiveness

- quantity over quality

- worship of the written word (I'd reword this as "inflexibility in communicating to stakeholders")

- only one right way

- paternalism

- either/or thinking

- power hoarding

- fear of open conflict

- individualism

- I'm the only one

- progress is expansive

- (pseudo-)objectivity

- right to comfort

Full article here: https://www.dismantlingracism.org/uploads/4/3/5/7/43579015/o...

Anyway thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. I just needed an opportunity to get my thoughts into words so that you can tell me how wrong I am.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com