The topic for this unit is Meetings. In smart working online meetings are an important part of our work. Loose some people took about wasting time, talking, discussing things in meetings, it would be impossible to coordinate and organize our collective work without them. Especially to distance in remote working. It's obviously very important though, that we insist on making our meetings effective. Let's have a look at the origin and then the evolution over time of meeting to help us identify some of the positive aspects, some of the best practices that we can then copy and implement ourselves. It's worth remembering that throughout history, humans voice tended to assemble in public places and share ideas in markets go as. By 600 BC in Ancient Greece, every major city had an Agora. The Agora was a commercial space located in the middle of the city. It consisted of various public buildings and market stalls. People gathered inside the Agora to buy and sell goods. But people also talked about politics and philosophical issues, or even just gossiped. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates were among the regular visitors to the Agora in Athens. The Agora was also the birthplace of democracy. The Athenians trusted in universal consent. If there was a law that needed to be voted, all ordinary residents went to an open meeting inside the Agora to debate the issue before they voted on it. Then the Roman Empire took over from the Greeks. About 146 BC, the Roman forum, like the Agora of the Greeks, was originally a public place, the commercial and political news, but it included religious rituals and festivities as well. Within the forum, the Korea was a meeting place for the Roman Senate. The Roman Senate had a really important influence over civil government, debating and voting on draft laws and devising new policies. The Prince Sonata's was the chief and the princess, reigned for a five-year term, responsible for scheduling meetings, opening, and closing sessions, reading papers to representatives, and directing the other senators. Inside the forum, the senators were all asked to speak in turn according to a strict hierarchical order. After debate, the senators were called on to vote. That was by physically moving to the side that they agreed with. Every meeting had to end by nightfall by statute, and senators employed different subversion techniques to postpone voting. The most famous of these with filibustering was speaking for a very long time. The second voting procedure was nicely represented by the Italian painter, Cesare Maccari, in the famous painting Cicerone denuncia Catilina. By the 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution, people wanted to exchange scientific knowledge. Then with the building of new universities, hotels, then new forms of meetings started to take place. These included workshops and forums and university lectures. In 1876 an army major, called Henry Martyn Robert wrote the first edition of Robert's Rules. These are based on those used in the US House of Representatives. The idea was to provide a guide to protocols for civil meetings. This book, Rules of Order, has been widely used by many different organizations, ever since and there have been many new editions that constantly released, the latest was in 2020. Robert's Rule tries to improve the decision-making process. Also tries to guarantee freedom of speech to everybody included in the meeting. It achieves that by establishing uniform guidelines and the same procedures for deliberation and for the dialogue. The aim according to rather, was to arrive at the general will on the maximum number of questions of varying complexity in a minimum amount of time, which basically means to reach consensus effectively. One of the central ideas in Robert's Rules, is the importance of having a chairperson who coordinates the meeting and keeps everything in order. Of course, in more recent years, technology is completely revolutionized meetings. When Microsoft launched PowerPoint to 1990, then this quickly became a really important tool for meetings all over the world because it allowed speakers to communicate their ideas much more quickly and to a much broader public. The idea is that with graphics then you create a stronger narrative that converts boring information, boring details into much more interesting stuff. Basically for us, speakers is always a helpful support to have the yet slides that to lean on and it makes the speaker feel less anxious. However, even PowerPoint started to lose popularity after a while because creating most really wonderful graphics is time-consuming and it's not always easy. Many businesses use alternatives these days. We only have to think of TED. TED talks there, conference speakers, for example, they're advised to use whiteboards or index cards to communicate the points. Then video conferencing technology obviously took as s step further. Google Microsoft Teams Zoom, they allow for online meetings with multiple participants from anywhere in the world. We can all be together in massive conference rooms or small groups can be created in parallel sessions. Of course, in many ways, this goes a long way towards replicating the in-office face-to-face experience of a meeting. However, is still important to use some of the specific techniques that have been developed and tried and tested throughout the years to make sure that the meeting we do have are really as effective as possible. Therefore a useful support to collaborative work at a distance.
