[EM] Comments re Robert's Rules of Order

[RLSuter at aol.com]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax abd at lomaxdesign.com writes (quoting
my previous post):

>>First, at something like 800 pages, it is way too long. Much
>>shorter alternatives to Robert's Rules have been written and
>>used widely, especially outside of the U.S. One U.S. book I
>>especially like is Cannon's Consise Guide to Rules of Order
>>by Hugh Cannon (less than 200 pages), originally published
>>in 1992. When meeting rules become as extensive as the
>>latest version of Robert's Rules, they benefit people who have
>>the time and patience to learn their details and harm people
>>who don't.
>
>There is an assumption here, which is that there is no chair who 
>understands the rules and considers it his or her duty to help
>members to use the rules to get what they want.

I made no such assumption. In fact, one of the things Cannon
emphasizes in his much more concise rules is the imporance
of a good chair.

The rest of your comments basically say that the rules will work
fine if properly understood and applied by the chair and by all
"factions" at a meeting. But a big problem is that they often
are not well understood, and one reason they aren't is that they
are unnecessarily and intimidatingly detailed and complicated.

Furthermore, when strongly competing factions exist, it is very
common for one to have a better understanding of the rules than
the other(s) (or for one to to have one or a few people who
understand them much better than anyone in the other faction(s)).
This happens all the time in the real world, as opposed to the
ideal world you seem to be writing about. It is also very common
for people and factions who understand the rules better to use
their command of the rules to get favored motions passed and
defeat ones they don't like.

In addition, I believe some of the rules are just wrong. The worst one
is the rule that a motion to end debate cannot itself be debated. That
rule, perhaps more than any other, is used strategically by people
who are more interested in getting their way than in ensuring that
a meeting is conducted democratically. In one meeting I participated
in where an organization was doing a major revision of its constitution
and bylaws, the use of that rule abruptly ended discussion of a
proposal that would have changed an important aspect of the
organization and might have greatly strengthened it. The provision
deserved more debate than most of the other provisions that were
discussed, yet because people at the meeting wanted to get
finished, it was rejected after a very short and inadequate debate,
following one argument against it that I felt was extremely unfair
(though superficially persuasive) but that was not permitted to be
answered, thanks to the use of one Robert's rule that I happen to
think needs to be fundamentally changed.

You totally ignored a possibility I was trying to express -- that
there may be alternatives to Robert's Rules that would work better
and result in more democratic meetings and decisions in most
if not all situations. I believe there are. But they won't be discovered
through debates about Robert's Rules. They will be discovered
by open-minded and open-ended as well as thoughtful and
well-informed experimentation with different kinds of meeting
rules and decisionmaking processes. Such experimentation
will have to be conducted by people who, unlike yourself, are
willing to at least seriously consider that there may be better
ways to conduct meetings.

In fact, many alternative rules and meeting and decisionmaking
processes have been experimented with and found quite useful --
and, in the view of at least some people, far superior to Robert's
Rules. The fact that none of them has yet becomed as widely
accepted doesn't mean they aren't better or that they won't
someday become more widely accepted than Robert's Rules
now are.

-Ralph Suter