![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Party principles
Jul. 22nd, 2021 04:40 pmA couple of months ago I decided that sometime before going back to in-person meetings I wanted to read Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, to see if it would help with a transition back to in-person meetings that would be more mindful than the emergency transition away from them. I mentioned this to my mom, who got a copy of it out of her library, read it, bought a copy, read it a second time, wrote a review, and then, when I asked if I could borrow the copy, said she was still using it and bought me my own copy instead. So, yeah, my mom really likes this book, and I totally intended to read it at least a month ago.
The Art of Gathering is about a lot of different types of gatherings, although admittedly “grassroots socialist meetings” are not one of them. Some of it is about conferences and some of it is about dinner parties and some of it is about “activist” meetings that usually seem to be the kind of places that can afford to hire a highly credentialed outside facilitator, often meaning the kinds of places that I would side-eye a bit as being charities or NGOs or part of the nonprofit industrial complex. Some of the book’s attempts to showcase High-Powered Clients, while admittedly probably a good move when writing for an audience of normal people, were my least favorite parts (interestingly, Parker is married to Anand Giridharadas, who wrote a book I very much enjoyed on why high-powered do-gooders as a concept are generally full of shit and not actually helping).
Still, I had a lot of questions about the chapter’s meetings, and wanted to read something that would help me think through them. Should we sing “Solidarity Forever” at the end of GMs? Is there some way we can shorten the rather lengthy rules-and-housekeeping portion of the beginning of the meetings? How can we better communicate expectations about what kind of meeting is for what purpose? How do we deal with people who come to us seeking to have various emotional needs filled, but with little or no interest in doing any of our work?
While this book did not necessarily provide Answers to any of these questions, it did provide some tips and framework concepts for thinking about them, which sometimes is precisely what I want out of the better class of easy-to-read nonfiction. It starts off with more fundamental principles of planning a gathering type of stuff, like trying to articulate the difference between a topic and a purpose, and what kinds of things make a strong, specific purpose that can help you actually make planning decisions. There’s some advice on general approaches to hosting and facilitating--including some common pitfalls made in the name of popular values, like being “chill”--which I found clarifying, some of which were provided in conveniently pithy quotes that I may be obnoxiously deploying sooner or later (“Protecting your guests is… about elevating the right to a great collective experience above anyone’s right to ruin that experience”). The later parts of the book are a bit more specific, including advice on communicating and enforcing “pop-up rules” (her term for event-specific behavioral expectations, contrasted with the snobby faux timelessness of “etiquette”), how to create strong openings and closings, and managing controversy (I found the stuff about controversy a bit glib at times, plus it featured the highest concentration of NGOs).
I was at one point kicking around the idea of doing a book club around this book to see if I could get other chapter members who do a lot of event planning/meeting facilitation/admin stuff to read it and talk together about how to make our meetings stronger, but I don’t know if enough people would be interested to make it worthwhile. I might just float some ideas to the relevant committees, or let people borrow the book if they’re interested. Or maybe we could do something more creative, like have another ~general meeting brainstorming session~ and ask everyone to bring 1 article or excerpt from something that they have personally found helpful or insightful in planning/hosting/facilitating meetings. I may have to talk to some people.
Also, I am increasingly convinced that we should in fact sing “Solidarity Forever” at the end of GMs.
The Art of Gathering is about a lot of different types of gatherings, although admittedly “grassroots socialist meetings” are not one of them. Some of it is about conferences and some of it is about dinner parties and some of it is about “activist” meetings that usually seem to be the kind of places that can afford to hire a highly credentialed outside facilitator, often meaning the kinds of places that I would side-eye a bit as being charities or NGOs or part of the nonprofit industrial complex. Some of the book’s attempts to showcase High-Powered Clients, while admittedly probably a good move when writing for an audience of normal people, were my least favorite parts (interestingly, Parker is married to Anand Giridharadas, who wrote a book I very much enjoyed on why high-powered do-gooders as a concept are generally full of shit and not actually helping).
Still, I had a lot of questions about the chapter’s meetings, and wanted to read something that would help me think through them. Should we sing “Solidarity Forever” at the end of GMs? Is there some way we can shorten the rather lengthy rules-and-housekeeping portion of the beginning of the meetings? How can we better communicate expectations about what kind of meeting is for what purpose? How do we deal with people who come to us seeking to have various emotional needs filled, but with little or no interest in doing any of our work?
While this book did not necessarily provide Answers to any of these questions, it did provide some tips and framework concepts for thinking about them, which sometimes is precisely what I want out of the better class of easy-to-read nonfiction. It starts off with more fundamental principles of planning a gathering type of stuff, like trying to articulate the difference between a topic and a purpose, and what kinds of things make a strong, specific purpose that can help you actually make planning decisions. There’s some advice on general approaches to hosting and facilitating--including some common pitfalls made in the name of popular values, like being “chill”--which I found clarifying, some of which were provided in conveniently pithy quotes that I may be obnoxiously deploying sooner or later (“Protecting your guests is… about elevating the right to a great collective experience above anyone’s right to ruin that experience”). The later parts of the book are a bit more specific, including advice on communicating and enforcing “pop-up rules” (her term for event-specific behavioral expectations, contrasted with the snobby faux timelessness of “etiquette”), how to create strong openings and closings, and managing controversy (I found the stuff about controversy a bit glib at times, plus it featured the highest concentration of NGOs).
I was at one point kicking around the idea of doing a book club around this book to see if I could get other chapter members who do a lot of event planning/meeting facilitation/admin stuff to read it and talk together about how to make our meetings stronger, but I don’t know if enough people would be interested to make it worthwhile. I might just float some ideas to the relevant committees, or let people borrow the book if they’re interested. Or maybe we could do something more creative, like have another ~general meeting brainstorming session~ and ask everyone to bring 1 article or excerpt from something that they have personally found helpful or insightful in planning/hosting/facilitating meetings. I may have to talk to some people.
Also, I am increasingly convinced that we should in fact sing “Solidarity Forever” at the end of GMs.