Assessments on the Retreat-Planning Workshop

Hello there interns, Jufranians, kasamas, overall supa cool people, it's Jack (that white guy and former educational development officer for '08-'09). Or, in elite speak (that is, 31i73 5p34k):

H3110 7h3123 1N7e12N5...awww fuck it, its to hard.

I just thought I would share my assessments from the latest planning meeting you all had for your guy's retreat. Carlo and I were talking over the weekend about our thoughts of the planning meeting and we generally had some points of agreement on what our deltas were for it (Carlo can expound in his own post, this is my b109 p057 damn-it!).

First, I liked the idea of having a meeting in where folks could see what it was like to take part in an LFS meeting, not the most exciting thing in the world, but I thought it was a good idea for folks to see and do themselves. I also loved the ice breaker, one of my favorites :-)

But I think the meeting started to break down during the planning for the retreat. There wasn't a lot of discipline (as Paul aptly points out), in my opinion, by the the coordinators to help guide the group in its discussion of how to plan for the retreat. While I understand that the coordinators wanted everyone to take charge and plan their own retreat the problem was that it could have been done more efficiently with more input from the coordinators as they have much more experience in actually trying to plan events while keeping on task and on time. This was evident, for me, when I came back from moving my car and reparking it and realizing everyone was still talking about food.

This lead Carlo and I to suspect that there had actually been very little structured planning for the retreat by the coordinators themselves and that they were using the interns to essentially plan the event instead of having a structured schedual with the interns providing important feed back and possible adjustments. This could have been, as Moo points, to the fact that there wasn't enough planning done in advance.

This, if I'm reading the blog posts right, lead to a retreat that was less of a retreat and more of a kick it with a single workshop. Proper planning in advance could have lead to a more structured retreat with a few workshops, get-to-know-each-other-sessions, mini-activities, and a fun hike; instead of the over abudence of down time that some of the interns, such as Faye, have pointed out.

Just thought I would point this out to ya'll. Thanks for letting me have the venue to post some Criticism/Self-Criticism. Hope to see you guys tomorrow!

-Jack