Running Section Board Meetings

[rwmastel]

How does everyone run their Board Meetings? It seems it takes us 2 hours to do 20 minutes worth of work. How is the meeting organized and led? Is it open & casual with lots of conversation? Is it formal and no one can speak unless they "have the floor"? Is there a written agenda?

[ggoodman]

We use a written agenda for our meetings that follows the same format each month. I try to keep us focused on what we are doing but that is occasionally a struggle as people do tend to get sidetracked. We are pretty casual in terms of allowing people to speak and input is encouraged. Most of our board members have been around for quite a while so we are comfortable with each other and how we think. We meet monthly at a restaurant and hold a dinner meeting; the meetings are about 2 hours including dinner. Agenda topics are usually meeting minutes, treasurer's report, tech report, old business, new business. We review our most recent events and spend most of our time working on the planning for upcoming events.