Chapel Hill Technology Advisory Committee

[Terri Buckner <tbuckner AT ibiblio.org>]

Gregg,

Unless there have been private conversations going on, only one person 
has expressed concern prior to your message and three others have said 
to add their name to the petition. As you know, the suggestion for 
sending this petition, under personal names rather than the full 
committee, came from our council representative. He also suggested 
asking the DEDC to submit a similar petition.

This has nothing to do with bypassing committee approval, undercutting 
teamwork, or not including new members. This is expediting a benign 
process and working within established town practices. If we act now and 
submit this with the agenda package by tomorrow noon, the manager will 
have the option of including this as part of the consent agenda and it 
won't take up the council's time on their last meeting of the 
year--which will be quite full of budget and other year end issues.

I fully support democracy and collaboration. But we are a committee that 
meets once a month so we also need to be flexible, especially when there 
is no cost and much benefit and the action is recommended by our council 
representative.

Terri


Gregg Gerdau wrote:

> Terri,
>
> As we previously discussed, I believe your idea has some merit and 
> deserves the opportunity to be thoroughly vetted with the TC before any 
> action is taken on behalf of the TC.  If you would like to add it to the 
> agenda for tomorrow's meeting, we could try.  As several people have now 
> pointed out: if, after these discussions, a petition to Council is in 
> order, there should be sufficient time to present it as a Committee 
> action for their 6/27 meeting, either via agenda or from the floor.
>
> I say "try" because this is not a one step process.  It has to fit into 
> an overall plan for how the TC approaches the achievement of its 
> purposes.  Step #1 is "building cooperative interaction with Council and 
> staff by establishing an atmosphere of compromise and give-and-take that 
> works consistently".  We'll make a good "jump start" on that with the 
> Mayor and Manager tomorrow. 
>
> Step #2 is realignment of old subcommittees and establishing new 
> subcommittees. This should be no surprise, as it is the basis on which I 
> offered my candidacy to Chair the committee: "I believe in teams. They 
> can be far more powerful than the sum of their individual 
> contributors.".  That can lead to getting many good things done without 
> having too much discussion that leads to inaction.  I'd like to propose 
> two right away  - open source (pilot) initiatives and community 
> networking (wireless) initiatives.  Although included in the 
> Infrastructure Subcommittee's strategic plan, these areas are growing in 
> activity and interest.  We could also consider having a subcommittee for 
> PR/communications.
>
> We have new members who will need a subcommittee to team with, retiring 
> members whose subcommittee slots are vacant, and a new chair and vice 
> chair who may not be leading or permanently part of the individual 
> subcommittees.    We need to discuss with who leads and serves on each 
> one.  Looking forward, I would hope the subcommittees would work toward 
> goals and report progress monthly. Frankly, I'm not sure I have a good 
> record of what the existing assignments are beyond the Infrastructure 
> Subcommittee.
>
> Interaction with the DEDC might be a separate subcommittee, if that's 
> what the TC decides, but I would start by proposing that it fits in with 
> the community networking subcommittee.
>  
> With Best Regards,
>  
> Gregg
> Gregg Gerdau
> Chair
> Chapel Hill Technology Committee
> cell     919-593-0037
> office  650-302-3500
> efax    650-618-1578
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chtechcomm mailing list
> Chtechcomm AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/chtechcomm