3 hours, 45 minutes

[onefixedstar]

Hints for anyone trying to persuade a council to pass a motion (or four) in support of your cause:

1. Consider your audience's background when framing your argument. Do not put forward arguments that will be difficult for your audience to believe (i.e. that one individual's personal grudge is the cause of widespread, officially-sanctioned persecution of a large group of people) when you're requesting immediate action with no chance for the council to verify the information you're providing.

2. Choose the wording of your motions carefully. Do not throw around terms like "hate propaganda" and "genocide" unless you're certain that the legal definition applies to your situation, and then be prepared to back it up.

3. When you're presenting at the end of an almost four hour meeting that's been extended three times to accomodate an hour of debate on your issue, do not answer a brief request for information with a ten minute spiel about how fantastic and worthy your cause is. Be particularly careful to avoid this if you're not even going to bother answering the original question.

A final bit of advice: Keep in mind when you're attending a meeting that began at 6:00 pm that there's a good chance that many of the members won't have eaten supper and are liable to be a bit grouchy by 9:30. Act accordingly: Stay on point.

Comments

[stillvisions.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the one meeting I went to, minus the genocide bit.

Also: if neither side can decide who gets the last word, flip a coin. In theory there's some moderator whose job it is to declare the debate over, but at the meeting I went to the moderator was so clearly on one side that they didn't even bother giving the illusion of being impartial.

Regardless, it beats both sides trying to reword the argurment one more time to get the last word.

[onefixedstar.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think it was an issue of trying to get the last word. I absolutely agreed with all the changes made to the motions and would have voted against them if those changes hadn't been made. People were picky, but no one was really stupid about it. The problem for me was that the guests we brought in (who were essentially the ones petitioning us) kept trying to convince us of the wrong things (i.e. that their cause is good and people are suffering unfairly) rather than actually answering questions.

Incidentally, one of the other things that came up in the meeting is that there are big problems in CS with students receiving their fellowship money late (as if you didn't know that). The rep estimated that about 10% of the grad students are having problems and asked if any other departments were having similar problems. Apparently it's a very uncommon problem, because only one other department said they were. I don't know what's going to happen, but it sounds like they're working on it.

[stillvisions.livejournal.com]

Good to know, thanks. I think there's upcoming changes at the top; hopefully that will at least do something for a bit. Though there seems to be multiple points of failure at work, so I'm not sure.