Recommendations for Improving ABS Discussed at Last Meeting; an Action Plan on the Agenda for the 17th

In attendance: Jennette Ginsburg, Steph Pedro, Carolyn Manning, Garrett Johnson, Robert Trudeau, David Young, Brian Salvatore, Loren Demerath, Katherine Brandle, Cynthia Keith, Maurice Loridans, Feico Kempff, Susan Fontaine, Jon Soul


The meeting’s focus was to review Jennette Ginsburg’s report (posted on this blog) made about how ABS might improve its capacity for accomplishing its mission. Jennette reviewed the basics of her report, where she describes the results of a survey of organization members she administered, and recommendations she made based on those results.


Among the recommendations are to clarify job descriptions, and to use action plans--including tasks, time frame, and who’s responsible.


The group expressed its gratefulness to Jennette for her hard work on the report.


The group discussed the recommendations and general issues raised by the report.


One such issue is the idea of seeking to have a unified message representing the group, particularly in controversial discussions, though it was also noted that expressing diversity of opinion within the group is consistent with its initial mission of externalizing conversations about a better Shreveport.


On job descriptions, it was noted that we can start by writing our own, then have a discussion from there.


As to communication with the larger membership of some-time attendees to meetings, it was noted that we no longer send emails to that larger group. Our intention has been to use the newsletter instead. It was noted that people can feel like they’re part of the group if they get regular stuff, such as a monthly newsletter, and weekly minutes report. We probably need to reiterate in every newsletter, that to comment on issues go to facebook, to read up on the group’s structure and projects go to abettershreveport.org (though it’s out of date), to see latest posts, go to the blogspot; and ideally, they should be centralized. There should at least be facebook links in the newletters and minutes reports. Garrett said that facebook is where the dialog happens; we could link to every blog entry in facebook. A goal could be to match the blog viewers to the facebook viewers.


The group decided to go over the action plan for implementing recommendations on the 17th. It was suggested that people bring back the action plan (which can be found in the report) with notes on it to the meeting on the 17th.