I have an idea related to the volunteer lunch at ASAE’s Annual Meeting.

In Lindy’s post about her first experience of being a volunteer on a council, she told the truth about how many of us feel about the volunteer lunch that kicks off the day of council meetings:

“First stop, the volunteer brunch. Good food. Mixed seating. A few words from our leaders John Graham, Velma Hart, and Robin Lokerman. Then reporting out from council chairs and leaders who wanted to share their accomplishments. Confessions:

• I felt like the experience reinforced a top-down hierarchy, with the leaders sitting on stage, and the minions reporting up to them.
• I admit feeling mildly annoyed as each council leader got up and said “we’re the best,” before launching into a recap of what they did. A friend of mine agreed, saying “why not have leaders congratulating OTHER groups for their accomplishments.”
• I was shocked and awed by the volume of cool stuff that people were doing. Wow!”

If you haven’t seen them, check out the great comments on her post, many of which were on this topic.

I confess I had similar thoughts last year during my first experience of this lunch.  I was initially interested to hear about all the amazing work being done by so many volunteers, but the format of the reporting out (which was basically long lines of people at two microphones waiting their turn) wore thin after what felt like 2 or 3 hours, and I believe I got bored and left.  This year, I was unexpectedly asked to report on RUTI (ASAE’s online community) and the work of the Technology Section Council (my reaction: “Really?  Do I have to? I’m hungover!” – ha ha).  I was reminded that the lines would get long so I should get up quickly – which I did, and was third in line to speak (I believe).   But I felt weird about the fact that even though I was now a year into my participating on a council and therefore more invested in talking about the stuff we’d all been doing, I still felt like this wasn’t a good way to show off all the amazing things everyone had been working on.  I still got bored long before the end, and that had nothing to do with the quality of the work being talked about, but simply the format of how it was presented.

So I have an idea for next year.

What if we could crowdsource the lunch reports?

Let me explain.  We now have, in RUTI, an online platform for showing off all the great work of the councils.  We could have an open “Awesome Council Work” forum or group where council members could talk about all the stuff they are doing throughout the year, in order for everyone, whether on a council or not, to see everything that was going on (and see who was involved or where to find out more about any particular thing).  Then, closer to the annual meeting, we could all vote on the top three or five projects that we want to hear more about – and have those be presented in more depth at the actual lunch.

In that way, people would already know about the work being done – the projects being worked on and books being written and research being undertaken – in aggregate.  This is hugely valuable in itself, because showing off an existing high level of engagement (which it is!) will only entice more people to be engaged and to get involved.  And then we could choose to hear more “behind the scenes” stuff about our top five.  We’d all gain a little ownership in the accomplishments of all the volunteers (simply byvirtue of being in the loop on progress over the year) and our citizenship in the association would be all the richer.

Another angle to this idea would be that instead of “minions reporting to the leadership”, the whole thing would be more about us reporting to each other – and part of that could be that rather than have the leadership giving us a speech,  we could have an open Town Hall style Q&A about what the leadership have been up to all year.  I bet Velma would be up for that!  There’s no denying she’s like the Obama of ASAE…

What do you think?  Would love to hear what ASAE would make of this idea too.