I guess, let me just start off by asking you. How long have you been in your neighborhood council, how did you get involved. Kind of what your main duties and responsibilities are.
Yeah, so I started coming to neighborhood council meetings. I'd say early 2017 I've been to a handful before that but hadn't gotten involved to the point that I was coming to most of them until 2017. And then in 2018 It would have been, I was appointed to fill a seat that was vacated. And then we have our elections. The following year, was elected and then real elected this past year. On neighborhood council I've served as a co chair of the Environmental Committee, and the Governmental Affairs Committees. And I was assistant secretary last year and this year I'm vice president as Assistant Secretary, I was tracking people down trying to get them to submit their agendas and the meeting materials and to do their minutes properly and put them on the, on the drive for archives.
And that's the first.
Honestly, it's getting difficult to do camera work. And then as Vice President, we don't really have a defined goal at our neighborhood council so I've been focused, as the chair of Governmental Affairs on a bylaw revision and haven't really done anything specifically as vice president yet. I just took that over a couple months ago.
Okay, fairly recently. And then, how much time do you dedicate, kind of like a ballpark, to doing your duties within your neighborhood council. Um,
it depends. But it can range from like a couple hours a week to pick 20 hours a week depending on what's going on. And certainly when there are larger projects, It takes more. And I will say as the assistant secretary and I think this is especially true of the secretary like there's just a lot of following up with people, which it takes time and you have to keep checking in. And so that is spread out over a long period of time. Whereas, personally I would prefer to just say okay, I am dedicating a few hours on Sunday and a few hours on Tuesday night and that's my neighbor Council time. But when it comes to things where you have to keep checking in with people, it just spreads out and so yeah you're not necessarily spending that much time on it. Each time but you have to remember to come back to it over and over and over again.
Okay. And then is there anything that you think would help that process for you or help kind of, I guess, manage your time better.
So, there, there are sort of three big things that I would love to see, Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, do a better job of helping with, and one of them is and I know you guys are talking about and working on this is having an agenda template. And even something that's more like a portal to be like, you know, this sounds stupid but a lot of people can't use Microsoft Word. Like, they, they just, I send them a template in Microsoft Word and I think it's great. It's all you have to do is just type in it and they can't do that. It gets messed up, and they don't understand. Word or Google Docs. But if there were just something where you could say, I'm picking this date. I'm picking this meeting type. This meeting location, and here are the various things that go in the agenda and it just exports it to something clean. I think that would help because a lot of what we had to do was go back to the chairs and say hey, do this right, fix it or we would have to fix it ourselves, if they send us the Word version. And then the other thing that I would love to see is, right now, all of our archives of agendas and minutes of meeting materials are controlled by us as a neighborhood council, which I appreciate the autonomy, but at the same time, we have significant turnover every couple of years, and, you know, we lose people documents get lost, like, very quickly. And we had one of our board members actually left a while ago and for whatever reason for email didn't get shut down. She decided one day to just delete her email, because she realized it was still there. And in doing so, all of the files that were owned by her on the shared Google Drive went away. And we were thankfully able to get them back because we caught up quickly, but like, those sorts of things happen, and if, if our former secretaries, email address, had gotten deleted and we hadn't been able to recover those files you have lost years worth of archives. So I would love to see done. Do something to have, at a minimum, the Brown Act required documentation like meeting minutes, some sort of archive that they control and manage, rather than it being all on a neighborhood council.
Gotcha. Yeah, I mean that that thing kind of happens within this organization hack for LA as well because volunteers are moving in and out and so sometimes important information or documentation is lost. So I completely understand that. Yeah. Okay, so we kind of transitioned a little into agendas and agenda creation. What, What's your main role in that.
I'm sorry Mike has attacking the bottom mature. With our agendas, I think obviously we have all the product requirements, we want to convey to the public what we're doing. We internally, have a slightly longer timeline because we try to get it out in our newsletter that goes out the Thursday before, like, it goes out on Thursdays, so all the meetings for the next week. We try to put them in the newsletter. Honestly, I just want some sort of basic template that's simple, it's easy for people who are looking up agendas to understand what's going to be at the meeting, and also easy for the chairs that are producing the agendas to make them. Because again, like, I can't stress enough, people don't get word. If they're really bad at it. And there's lots of things that you know, I've been guilty of certainly where, you know, you're updating a date and you update it in one place but you don't fix it in another place, And so having something that if it were possible to just automatically generate like I would be.
So are you saying right now you guys don't have a template for any of your agendas, so every Oh,
we do. We have a template I made a template, a couple years ago, it's just not being used in secretary. It is used, poorly, not like the way the template is set up, it has, you know, a section where there's a little table within it. Where it's like motion, a simple motion language here and then there's a table where you can log each person's votes. And people just leave in the sample blank motion. When like interests was like rope motion here. No. So so even trying to give them something really simple a template just, they still can't use it well. And maybe I made it too complicated by including. Here's what a motion should look like in your template
in from your perspective, why do you think people are having difficulty using the template that you've provided. Is it something to deal with like people being adverse to technology, or. Okay.
Yeah, I, I don't think that people close in age to us, would have as much of an issue, but that's not the majority of people who are on neighborhood councils, at least not on mine. I, this person. And, you know, I see it all the time, where they do something, I don't know what they've done, but then of like changes justifications, the columns get weird like things just happen and no one is taking the step to correct whatever it is, because I think they're just not comfortable using the program. And I don't know how to fix that, maybe simplifying it would help, but we tried to simplify it, and it didn't, it wasn't necessary.
Gotcha. And then I think you mentioned this already but how many different types of agendas are there. I feel like you were kind of talking about the committees have agendas and maybe there's the general board agenda is there any other agendas that you guys have to process.
Um, no, we really only have the committee agenda template and then there's a template for the General Board meeting. That's similar but a little bit different. And that one again like. There are some times when I look at what happens to that, and it's, it's handled by Secretary who's not completely technologically illiterate but like it's still there are times where I don't know what the heck she did to it, but it looks weird. So yeah, those, those are really the two is the general meeting agenda, and the committee's.
Okay, and then what what's like what's the your approval process for the agenda, because you're saying that there is a lot of kind of issues that you see, does do those issues make it all the way to the final agenda or there's somebody kind of stopping it before it hits that point. Um,
yes or no. So the agenda approval process for committees is just the committee chair makes the agenda. When I was assistant secretary and I was getting sent every agenda. If it was word I would try to clean it up. If it wasn't, and it wasn't really important. I would just let it go, like if they'd already PDF it. But if it was something major. I would read back and be like, Can you fix this, or can you send me a word version so I can fix it like there were times where they just straight up had the wrong date for the meeting. And so, like, those would usually get caught, but honestly we don't really have a review process in place for committees, other than really egregious errors, hopefully getting caught by whoever is the Secretary or assistant secretary, before it gets posted. And then for the general meeting agenda, a draft version of it is reviewed at exact, and then sort of like Lincoln approved, not like sometimes it changes between exact and when it actually gets posted. But, again, like no one really is sitting down and going, Hey, why did you make the justification weird or why did you, you know, leave in this blank. A and B, under something, even though there's not anything there, like, you just have to let it go, so many hours in the day.
Gotcha. I guess, changing gears a little. I kind of want to know a little bit more about public comment and I know that's probably changes a little because of COVID And do you guys, you guys broadcast your meetings now through zoom or is that, okay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean if you can you kind of talk about how you guys deal with public comment.
Yeah, and in the before times when we met in person. There were little comment cards that you could fill out, or the general public comment section and you would get three minutes to speak on the topic. I don't think you had to fill out a speaker card, because I think that would have been a Brown Act violation to insist that someone fill it out. Now, people just raise their hand during the general public comment section, and we give them. Well right now we give them three minutes. And then if they want to make a comment on one of the other, like agenda items because general public comment is ostensibly for things that are not on the agenda. And if you want to comment on an agenda item, wait until that time. For that, whether it was before or now, people just raise their hands, they use the zoom. Raise hand function. There was a period of time where we were very insistent on the board, could not respond at all to public comment, which is not really what the actual rules are, you can make a response, you can answer a question. To do that, but people were being very conservative about that rule, like a year or so ago, and then that person left. And so now, there's a little bit of a response. You're not supposed to take up anything. Like, you're not supposed to do any work on something that someone asks about, but we do have a brief response usually, If someone asked a question or makes a request. And then there's a broader question that I don't think we've really resolved at this point with regard to the order of operations when it is in agenda item, between when the board gets to discuss. And when the public gets to discuss and, and sort of the way we've been doing it before was the board will have a discussion, then they'll hear from the public, and then the board can't say anything else, they have to either move on from that point, or vote if it's a motion, which I don't know how much that is just a policy
like actual legal like law,
policy, versus the way our bylaws are written very stupidly. Then, not clearly, it doesn't actually say order of operations, it just lists things, and everyone's assume that's an order of operations until you get to the parts where it's clearly not in an order of operation, and they just ignore that, that part is also on the list. So, I don't really know how we're supposed to handle that. If the board really is not supposed to speak after the public speaks,
and then do. Do you guys accept or, or take public comments for from community members that aren't able to be present at the meeting. Well,
yes and no. I mean, obviously, with Zoom. That's a lot easier than having to attend the meeting, but I know that we have, like, people can write to us as a board, people can email us. I don't believe that we are supposed to, and I don't believe that really ever have, like said, Okay, we got a, an email from so and so. And this is their stated position like we've never sort of had that sort of discussion but proxy type thing. My understanding is that we're not really supposed to, like, they're not supposed to relay information, like a kind of hearsay type of.
Okay, So you're, you're saying that people have emailed you with comments on agenda items. But you guys have never really read those public comments out or,
I don't think we've ever read them publicly. Like, hopefully, on the board members that are getting sent these are recurring emails but, but I don't believe that we have a process in place for if you can't attend the meeting, please comment on this agenda item and we'll read this at the meeting.
Okay, I mean that makes sense. I mean, also, things have changed a lot over the last year so it's like, maybe those things haven't really been talked about or written into any type of procedure. So that makes sense. And then, can you talk a little bit about the distribution process of your agenda, who receives it, where is it posted, how is it distributed.
Yes, so if a committee chair, Or my secretary went into the general meeting agenda. That was supposed to be sent to at least previously it had been the Assistant Secretary, I think now, usually goes directly to the Secretary just because we had a recent changeover. And then, the Secretary or the assistant secretary would gather everything together all of the meeting minutes that needs to be voted on the agendas, all of the materials for each meeting, send them over to the secretary, who would then send it over to our social media manager who's a paid individual, and she would load it to the website, and add it into the newsletter that goes out on Thursdays, the assistant secretary would also or the committee chair depending on if the committee chair was good enough to do this would email a BNC support email address to get it posted to the early notification system that the city has. So it all of the agendas, go to the bowling notification system by some means. And then agendas, any meeting documents including meeting minutes that are going to be voted on for approval, get posted on our website. And, yeah, it's, it's not a smooth process there, internally, but
what, what's it like three people.
Is it okay so is it not smooth because it is passing through so many hands or.
Yeah, I mean, when I was just in Secretary I kind of badgered them into letting me just put it on the website because it's not frickin hard to use WordPress but apparently it is. And so, when I was no longer Assistant Secretary, they sort of took that out of the Assistant Secretary's hands and gave it back to the Social Media Manager. So that means, you know, everyone's supposed to send their agenda to Assistant Secretary that Assistant Secretary sends it to the Secretary and then the secretary sends it to the Social Media Manager, who then puts it on the website I'm just like, this process could have been.
So with, with all the hands it's passing through Do you guys have certain hard deadlines of when people need to get these documents to post them on time to meet the Brown Act.
I mean the hard deadline for the Brown Act is 72 hours, so if you haven't gotten it in, and it hasn't been able to be posted 72 hours in advance, then you can't have your meeting, so we have that as like a real deadline, the theoretical deadline is the Wednesday before your meeting at 7pm You're supposed to have gotten it in so that we have time to get it loaded to the website and added to the newsletter that goes out on Thursday, which obviously is significantly more than 72 hours before a meeting if that meetings happening like the next Wednesday. So that's, that's our internal deadline.
Okay, so you guys kind of have, I guess kind of fail proof in place by setting the deadline so far in advance, the internal deadline.
Yeah. And people don't make that, like, honestly, I think it's probably 5% of the time that most committee chairs actually make that deadline.
Is that why you guys maybe I've set a deadline so far in advance because like it's an issue of getting all the correct documentation in order.
Yes, yes or no. So the reason that it is not 72 hours is, we have a newsletter an email newsletter that goes out every Thursday. And so if we can, we'd like to include links to the agendas for all of the following meetings, because we figure that will be helpful to inform people. And, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about moving that newsletter to a different day and there's a lot of pushback saying when no one opens newsletters when we send them on Saturdays, so we have to send it by Thursday, how much I agree with that. Personally, I don't open newsletters at all deleted.
But
the Wednesday deadline in order to get in the newsletter Thursday, is very much a product of people are late. And there was a proposal at one point to have it be a Tuesday deadline because people are late, like it doesn't matter if you remind them on Monday, it doesn't matter if you remind them every single day of the weekend till they turn it in. We're going to be late.
Okay, this, this brings up something that I've had questions about what other neighborhood councils do you guys have some kind of reminders system in place to notify all these people and who is in charge of that if so,
I mean when I was assisting tech Secretary the reminders system was me, I would just schedule send emails every Monday to say hey turn in your agenda. There is not one now. And no one honestly effectively communicated to the committee chairs after the changeover that, that even was the deadline. It was just kind of assumed that everyone knew even though half the board was new, so that's a training failure on our part. But, yeah, we don't have anything set up, really, it's it's one of the things I advise that the Secretary do, but so far no.
Okay, so that's like left up to one person to make sure to remind everybody. Yeah. And then switching topics a little again. Do you guys produce the agenda in any other languages besides English.
We do not. I believe that, at least according to our agenda, footer stuff. There are translation services, so if someone wanted to request it in another language, I believe that they can email our secretary, and she can then ask the city to translate it. But we don't internally have translation services or pay for anything ourselves. And from your I don't think we've ever gotten a request. Okay, that's
what I was gonna ask because like from your, from your experience of being Secretary that's never come up.
No, and I was only Assistant Secretary so the Secretary would get that request as opposed to the assistant secretary. And I don't know for sure but based on our demographics, if I remember correctly, we are a. We're a very small neighborhood council district we're like the third smallest, and I don't think we have a significant population for which English is not a main language. So I think we might have just different needs and some other neighborhood council areas.
Gotcha. And then I just have a couple more questions that we can wrap up. What would you consider the highest priority when, when you guys are creating agendas. Whether it be general board or committee, I mean I know those probably vary a little from the general board in the committee but, I mean, Whatever you can talk to.
I mean, for me, when I'm creating an agenda, my highest priority is making sure the information is correct, making sure the data is correct, making sure any links that are in the agenda, or write any, like, language is right, and trying to make sure that it's informative. I don't. What, what kinds of things. Have other people answered, related to like what's the highest priority.
I mean, it kind of varies because there are so many neighborhood councils so everyone's kind of dealing with something a little bit different and some more, more equipped to handle certain situations than other neighborhood councils. Some have more resources. So it's really just kind of based on each neighborhood council, I was just kind of curious, what, what it was for you guys or you specifically.
Yeah, I mean for me, Honestly just having the correct information is really what matters to me. And of course, the way Neighborhood Council works is you can't take action on anything that's not agendized. So like, if you don't have your motion on the agenda, then you can't vote on it. If you don't have someone listed as a committee member, then they can't vote, like,
it just,
yeah. Okay, so it's like very important that this information is correct and on the agendas. Work it throw a wrench, a wrench in the whole process. Yeah. Okay. And then, how has, how has or if, if any, Has your process changed for creating agendas. Because of COVID.
Um, It hasn't really changed significantly. Because the only big change now is, we're required to vote to approve committee meeting minutes, whereas before I think we just did minutes and call it a date. And so we're also required to post the materials like any documents including save minutes for approval or, you know, information related to neighborhood purpose grant or stuff like that on our website, or somewhere it's required to be posted. Which before I don't believe was a requirement because we would just have printed copies available in the meeting. So that's the biggest difference is having to make sure that materials are posted in addition to just the agenda itself. But otherwise the agendas themselves are not really.
Okay and then these materials are documentation that you guys have to post. Is there specific times when you are deadlines when you need to post these items.
Um, I don't know if there's an official deadline, but we've been just interpreting it as part of the brown acts and we do our requirement, which I should say, for special meetings, that's 24 hours. But for most of our meetings 72
Um, yeah I think that's about it for me, I guess, just one final question do you think, what we're creating will be helpful to your neighborhood council, Would it be something you guys would use, um,
I guess it would depend a little bit on what exactly the tool you're creating is, is it something where like you would go in and use it as a word processor replacement that like, you fill in the stuff there and it exports an agenda, or is it something where you're just going to create, like, here's a word document template that you then fill in
a little bit more of the first thing you said, And also, I mean, part of this research process is finding out different pain points and different features that maybe could be added to the program but I guess on kind of a general overview. What you stated was fairly close to. Unlike initial idea.
Yeah, I mean, I would say I think we'd use it and I think a lot of neighborhood councils, would like to from my limited conversations on it. I think the agenda creation process itself is just a pain point because people are. Well, first of all people are bad at work but I know that I would love to have just a thing that I know is creating an agenda that adheres to all of the start like our agenda is at the end have a whole bunch of paragraphs with information on them, and for a long long time. They were all in like size 10 font or something. And then I actually read the little booklet I got handed when I was first elected. And I was like, actually, this needs to be in 12 point font. That's a rule like
didn't know that.
Yeah. Like it wasn't accessible to everyone when it's at, like a 10 point font.
Yeah. So little things like making sure that whatever we're producing is the right thing to fire station today. We're just nice.
Got it. Okay, I mean that's, that's it for me. Do you, Do you have any questions for me or I mean you don't have to ask any questions I'm just curious if you if you wanted to know anything else, or had any other questions related to the project we're working on.
I mean, I guess I just find this to be very neat, because I am such a paperwork and process person in my actual real life job, so I just love the idea of templatized, making it easier for all to look the same and so people know exactly. I need to find the Zoom link it's going to be here. And then we, like, honestly, we have a template for stuff, people do an okay job, they don't touch the parts that are really important like the Zoom link, but just knowing that it could export and be a little clear.
Yeah I mean I think there's always room to kind of make things a little bit more accessible and intuitive. And kind of eliminating the room for error that might be already there.
Yeah. Have you guys thought about like, when it would theoretically export from the system in some way, like making sure that its principal in a way that's not taking up tons of pages or tons of ink.
No we I guess we haven't really considered that so what, what, so your, Your concern is that when you guys, print out these agendas, they just, they're kind of wasteful.
Yeah, so we, I should have mentioned this before. Another thing that we do with all of our agendas is we post them on a bulletin board, and it's not a huge bulletin board so we run out of space pretty quickly. And so, you know, obviously people should be keeping their agendas relatively brief, sometimes you're not as good at that as, other times. But, you know, we have. If there's a lot of white space on the page, which may make it kind of easy to read, but once we have to print it like that takes up the entire bulletin board with, you know one committee agenda and if you have two or three committees meeting in a week. Run space very quickly. And then of course, I know that sometimes when you do things like for a digital version of it. Like I made the mistake of putting together a little training infographic, and I just use the Canva template, which had a dark background. And then, two of my fellow neighborhood council people printed it out when we're going over the draft and it's just like, oh my god, you just printed out like a mostly black page. So things like that, that, consider the fact that a lot of people are gonna still print an agenda. Yeah, okay, that's making it a lot of pages and a lot of ink. Okay, that
makes sense what you're saying I hadn't really considered that aspect of it. And you're also still
attending neighborhood councils are older and they like to print things.
Yeah. So you're also saying that, like the committee, agendas. Some of them don't take up a whole page, so you'll have to say you had like 10 committee agendas, you'd have to print out 10 pieces of paper and posted. When like maybe it could be also consolidated onto like,
