Minutes from Co-op Meeting March 21st 2011
Present- Karen, Jen, Laura, Celia, Eric (by Phone)
At Karen’s Apt.
Author of these minutes: Jen V
1. We read over
the core rules and they were ratified!
We are so much better than congress!
2. There is some dispute as to the meaning of the
manual override clause.
To explain the thinking behind its creation, I will give a few examples:
a. A certain anonymous child was having a hard time being left at night with sitters and would cry and shut itself in its room. There were one or 2 people that the child was more comfortable with, so the parent choose to use them for a night sit
b. Another child was being left to be put to bed for the 1st time by someone other than its parents. Again, there were a few sitters the child felt more comfortable with so the parent chose one of those.
c. There was a very long play date sit, so the parent wanted a child that their child would be happy playing with for an extended period of time.
Some members understood it to mean that if more than one person accepted a sit, that you could decline the most negative and choose the next negative. In this scenario-if 4 people said yes, and you declined the 1st 3 most negative to go with the 4th, you would be considered to have used up all of your manual overrides
Other members understood it to mean that you could choose whom you wanted for up to 3 sits per year.
One suggestion was to have a VIP sit where you could choose a sitter-one or 2 per year as well as a Manual Override where you declined the 1st person and went for the 2nd in line 1 or 2 x per yr.
We recognized the potential for abuse in this in that certain members could only request each other and the rest would be shut out for sits.
We were unable to come to a conclusion on this and will think about it and discuss it at next meeting. Karen is going to draft up a new side-sit bill for discussion.
3.
Members are reminded to respond to sits in a timely fashion.
Secretaries (and/or people who are self-secretarying) are reminded to assign sits in a timely fashion. EG: Please put in the comment section in caps-SIT ASSIGNED TO ____.
Secretaries, please ask the undecided via email to respond ASAP.
If you are the requestor and have not heard back about your sit, it is acceptable and even encouraged to send an email to the secretary as well as any potential sitters (either yeses or undecideds) asking who will be doing the sit.
4.
Please cancel sits in a timely fashion as well.
To do so, please put CANCELLED in the
title of your request.
You can also delete it from 30 Boxes by right clicking on the title and pressing delete.
(If you don't have a mouse with right click, you need to get one. Seriously, how do you live?)
Also let the secretary and any potential sitters (yeses or maybes) know via email. They may have been reserving the time for you in their calendar. They can now put this time to good use by watching kittens on YouTube or doing something ”just one more time” with their kid/s.
5.
Updates or Edits to your sit do not go out to everyone as an email. They can only see it on 30 boxes. So please send an email to the secretary about your update/edit, or if it is a big change, delete/cancel the sit and send out a new one. Note in your sit that this is an update of the previous sit.
6.
Please file a sit report in a timely fashion. Not all secretaries have a lot of hair that can afford to be pulled out when they are tracking sits at the end of the month.
It was decided that if neither sitter nor sittee discuss filing the sit report that it can be assumed to be the default responsibility of the sitter.
However, if the sittee wants to file it, by all means go ahead.
7. If you are a potential sitter on a sit, it's a good idea to check 30 boxes to see what’s going on with that sit.
8. If the sittee is late picking up their kid/s they can work it out with the sitter as to whether any/how many bonus late points will be assigned.
I also think it's a good idea if you think you might be late to ask in advance if it is possible to the sitter to watch longer.
When you are making your initial sit request, make realistic estimates about traffic and public transportation to give your sitter a realistic ending time.
9. It was suggested for safety/privacy reasons that we not use children’s full names on sit requests, but only initials, or the parent’s name.
10.
The leader should sent out a reminder to the members about meetings.
They are the 3rd Monday of every other month.
The next meeting is May 16th.
11.
Since there are only 6 meetings a year it is very important to attend them.
Each member is allowed to miss one meeting a year w/o penalty. After that, a penalty of 2 pts will be assigned. (This is an old rule that we have been failing to enforce for some time.)
There was also some discussion of having some of the 6 be business meetings and others be social gatherings. We can discuss this more at next meeting.
12.
We are looking at an outing for the spring.
Suggestions were Queen’s Farm, Aquarium, Berry Picking, and Queens’ Botanical Gardens/Flushing Eating Adventure.
13. We decided to forget the Skype idea for the moment. Speakerphone works just fine, and why should you be required to get dressed if you are not leaving the house.
14. Finally, we learned that Ginny is a puppeteer. Very Cool!
