Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Criteria for setting meeting agendas

[Howard Landman (howard]

> We have a parking lot of issue and some of
> these issues have been in the parking lot for many months.  Clearly, this
> is discouraging many people.   These are issues that can wait.  And they do.
> What is also frustrating to people is that some people wait and wait
> patiently for issues which are important to them to come to the general
> meetings.  Then someone else proposes an issue which needs immediate
> attention.  So then the parking lot issues have to wait even longer.

A fundamental theorem of Queuing Theory is that if items are added to
a queue on average faster than they are serviced, then the queue
will grow arbitrarily large with probability 1.  It sounds to me like
you are not servicing issues quickly enough.  I would recommend having
extra meetings to deal with them until the parking lot is empty.

Based on your having about a dozen items backed up in about 6 months,
it sounds like you need to increase your throughput by about 2 items
per month on average.

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Cohousing
        Fort Collins, CO
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