No agenda was provided to the public for today’s meeting, and few people are willing to stay for a five-hour session with an unknown agenda, with a large portion of the meeting devoted to housekeeping matters, such as delegate reimbursement for expenses.

One meeting highlight was a report from the VICC’s Standing Committee on Finance and Public Services, which has produced five articles over the past several months and has done most of the VICC’s work during that period. The report provided detailed information on the committee’s meetings and hours worked, broken down by each article discussed, but it offered no details on the committee’s proposed changes to those articles. The committee has held 30 meetings, totaling 78 work hours in session, averaging about 2.5 hours per meeting.

The report also provided insight into VICC’s public records strategy. VICC appears to be keeping extensive meeting records but will make them public only at its convenience. The records it keeps include: all meeting agendas, all meeting attendance records, all meeting Zoom recordings, all meeting transcripts (automatically generated from the Zoom recordings), all meeting summaries, and all written submissions from delegates and constituents.

VICC doesn’t seem to recognize that not providing meeting agendas and draft proposals to the public may inhibit meaningful public participation. Not many people, except insider favorites, would be able or willing to spend so much time attending such ill-defined and largely incomprehensible meetings while the meetings are discussing hidden documents, except for the fragment of a document currently under discussion. None of this should detract from the hard and often excellent work the committee has done.

Here is my brief set of comments in the chat room:

J.H. Snider 1:12 PM
Did anyone other than the VICC delegates receive an agenda for today’s plenary session?

Bonny Corbeil 1:16 PM (Edited)
Good afternoon Mr. Snider…Delegate President  Richard Chairs this Plenary meetings…
I did not see an agenda shared on the screen as Delegate Imani Daniel usually does in all of her chaired meetings…as I recall. Bonny.

J.H. Snider 1:24 PM
Thank you, Bonny. Does anyone know if there is any public information on delegate attendance at the various meetings, including plenary meetings such as today’s? Also, I was referring to agendas made available before meetings, not to the occasional agenda posted at a meeting.