On 2009-May-08, at 06:33, Mary McRae wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I just wanted to make sure to let everyone know proper Robert's
> Rules procedure - Roll Call must be taken at the start of the
> meeting. The Chair or Secretary calls the roll, and each person on
> the call must identify themselves.
While there may be some organizational rule that mandates the
inefficient practice of always having a full formal verbal roll call,
there is nothing under Robert's Rules of Order that mandates that the
secretary call role in the way we do so now.
Our current, inefficient method:
The secretary (as the appointed attendance clerk) reads off names and
people attempt to say something shortly after their name
is very likely not strictly a roll call under Robert's Rules of Order
because those who respond to their name are NOT acknowledged. Nobody
on the call is able to know if, when a name is called and they hear
nothing, if that person was not counted as present, or if they simply
failed to hear the person respond (but the secretary did), or if the
person attempted to respond to their name and failed (because of
noise, or they did not un-mute their line). Indeed the current method
falls short because when your name is called, you have NO WAY to know
if you were heard until after the attendance is published. It is
improper to have a formal attendance call where those present do not
have a definitive way to determine who is and who is not present.
And while I do not recommend this method: If we were following a
strict formal attendance call by voice only:
the secretary (as the appointed attendance clerk) would read off a
member name
"John Doe"
if the secretary (as the appointed attendance clerk) hears the member
respond, then the secretary announces:
"John Doe is present"
else the secretary (as the appointed attendance clerk) on not hearing
a response repeats the member name:
"John Doe"
if the secretary (as the appointed attendance clerk) hears the member
respond to the second call, then the secretary announces:
"John Doe is present"
else secretary announces:
"John Doe is not present"
The above would be a waste of time.
There are plenty of parliamentary bodies operating under Robert's
Rules of Order where both attendance and quorum are determined by some
other means such as electronic sign-in. I will point out that those
bodies have fallback procedures for when the optimized attendance
method (say electronic sign-in) fails, or an individual member
requests to be recognized (say because they are unable or unwilling to
use the electronic sign-in).
Under Robert's Rules of Order, there could be a roll call such as:
The chair requests members to sign-in on WebEx to do so now if
possible,
and then the secretary reads off the names of members listed WebEx.
and then the chair asked those names were not called out to identify
themselves
and the secretary acknowledges each member who verbally identify
themselves
The above method does meet requirements for a attendance clerk call
call in that everyone can determine who is and is not here, and
everyone present can determine if they have been properly identified
as being present.
chongo (Landon Curt Noll) /\oo/\
