How to do meetings

Meetings are an opportunity to help everyone stay in sync with what's going on and to build and share excitement. They can also be deathly boring and waste huge amounts of time. Here's how to do meetings right:

Status Meetings

1. Limit status meetings to 1 total hour per week (max) for any student or mentor.

2. Every meeting should have a brief, specific agenda. Send it out before the meeting or in the worst case present it at the start of the meeting. If you don't have an agenda, you shouldn't have a meeting.

3. Format:

   1. Start the meeting with brief (<5min) good news: accomplishments, new sponsors, new members, etc.

   2. Briefly state the agenda (<2min)

   3. Round robin through sub-team/project leads (<5min each) to report status relevant to other teams

   4. Discuss decisions that can be made by the group - get everyone's opinion before sharing your own.

   5. Summarize what has been agreed to be done by next meeting.

   6. Remind date of next meeting

   7. Engage the participants - go round-robbin and get status from each activity/team/project lead.

4. Stay focused on status/events/schedule.

5. Don't try to solve technical problems in a status meeting. Note the problem and meet in a smaller group to