[eDebate] My thoughts on the Topic Committee Process

[Mikedavis13 at aol.com]

Hey All,

I will post more detailed thoughts about the specific resolutions and the 
viability of the various approaches and wordings. After some exhaustive work over 
the past three days I am confident that topics choices offer a great degree 
of debateability, but I'll discuss that more after the CEDA summer meeting.

My thoughts on the topic committee:

1.  Everyone worked extremely hard. Now I have been to meetings before (the 
last one was about four years ago) and the amount of research done during the 
evenings was impressive. I am sure that individuals will feel that ideas are 
left of the list, but there were a significant number topics that were 
researched to the point of exhaustion before being surrendered. The willingness of 
everyone to work all week to ensure that we came up with the best topics that this 
area would allow is something that everyone should thank the committee for. 
It is truly a thankless job.

2.  Steve Mancuso did an incredible job at building a consensus on issues of 
contention. There were certainly times when the topic committee members dis
agreed on issues and I thought that Steve went out of his way to make sure 
everyone's voice was heard. As a non-member of the committee who was here for the 
entire week I certainly appreciate it (see #3).

3.  I was not on the topic committee. I have complained about previous 
ballots and wordings so this year I decided to be more proactive in my approach to 
the topic. Except for the few times when a vote was required to move along I 
felt that I was treated no different by the committee members by those who were 
formally on the committee. 

4.  I encourage more people to attend these meetings. You cannot comprehend 
the amount of work and time and discussion that occurred at these meetings 
unless you observed what occurs at one of these. I will work to come back to these 
meetings yearly whenever I can. I wanted to thank all of the committee for 
their efforts to ensure that everyone had a chance to have their voices heard.

5.  I have been to three topic meetings and I want to express to the students 
that your concerns were represented extremely well by Greta Stahl. Her work 
and comments were a valuable asset to the committee and I hope that future 
student reps will be as valuable in the process as Greta was. 

That's it for now. I am sure I will think of more things as time goes on, but 
I wanted to take a few minutes to express my gratitude to the committee for 
their work. I am extremely pleased with the final resolutions and I hope that 
the community can move on to discussing the merit's of the topics and not the 
issues they felt the topic committee should have included.

Thanks for listening,
Mike
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.ndtceda.com/pipermail/edebate/attachments/20030614/5c3f82a8/attachment.html