[Peace-discuss] Tonight's meeting

[Al Kagan]

That was a pretty intense meeting tonight.  We have been working 
together pretty smoothly these last two and a half years. I think we 
can congratulate ourselves on that.  One of reasons for our success 
is that we have respectful discussion.  For whatever reason, what 
happened tonight was an exception to our rule.

We must provide an environment where people feel free to speak.  I 
think only a small number of the folks in the room spoke tonight, and 
unfortunately I think that is usually the case. So we need to work on 
that a bit.

I think that the men tend to speak more than the women.  Perhaps we 
(the men) need to be more sensitive to that, especially when we are 
discussing questions having to do with women's rights and sexism.

We also need to be sensitive to the facilitator.  We need to make 
that job easy, not difficult.  We need to give the facilitator some 
help in encouraging everyone.  Likewise we need to support the 
facilitator when someone goes on too long or speaks too many times in 
a row. Everyone should remember that effective meetings will not 
happen when people think they have the right to speak for as long as 
they think they should.   We have to trust our facilitators to put on 
the brakes.

I would especially like to hear what the women think about tonight's meeting.
-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu