[Businessmtg] Threading

[Steve Rankin]

Hi ASPers,

First, there is a difference between an Al-Anon recovery meeting and an
Al-Anon business meeting.  

Most Al-Anon recovery meetings are simply individual sharings of ESH, and
discourage cross talk because cross talk would inhibit the free and open
sharings that are such a critical part of our program.

OTOH, cross talk is common and even necessary in a business meeting where
members are discussing issues and the goal is to reach a consensus. Back and
forth discussion is a natural and normal part of that process, so there we
do not discourage cross talk in the business meeting. 

Threading. Some threading is useful. Unlike a f2f business meeting where
everyone is in the same room and participating in the discussion in real
time, our Business Meeting is attended by members from all over the world.
None of them are in the same room, and there is no requirement that anyone
participate in real time. There is a reason why our business meetings last
so long - because it takes days before everyone in the business meeting
"checks in" and responds. 

It is common for someone to check in on Monday after a long weekend and
respond to something someone said last Friday. Including SOME of that thread
helps me follow that members train of thought. This is especially true when
the member says something like "I agree with Lois". Huh? So, I have to go
back and see what Lois said. But what about when Lois said several things? 

Jerry may be onto something about how hand-held devices work. However. I
just tried mine (Samsung Galaxy on Verizon) and it works basically the same
as my Window computer running MS Outlook for my email client. I don't know
how Gmail works because I detest using web mail apps - my life is too short
to wait for a page refresh every time I do something. Nor anything using
iOS.

This reminds me of way back before I started ASP. Don R., a friend of mine
in f2f Al-Anon was the founder of CAFG (the first online Al-Anon meeting
that was available to anyone with an Internet connection). I was the
Business Chair for CAFG. Don loved using IBM's OS2 operating system on his
computer as well as the old plain text email clients that ruled the roost in
those days. I was an early adopter of a new-fangled app from Microsoft that
let me do cool things like bold and underlined and colors. I suspect that
many of you can't even imagine such a time - almost like carrier pigeons and
the Pony Express. Well, what drove Don crazy was that his old-fashioned
email didn't know what to do with the new email apps, so it displayed the
code embedded in mine and others as gibberish text. Don had to scroll down
through the gibberish to get to what we said. The points of the story is
that life isn't stagnant, things change, and life in the good 'ol days
wasn't really that good anyway.

None the less, this is something where I think we need to be tolerant and
strive to accommodate our members participation more than trying to get them
to adapt their technology or even their habits, to our administrative way of
doing things. 

Hugs,
Steve