notes-politics-miscPoliticsTips

i haven't done much in this area but some of these are tips from others who have:

• the crucial thing is not the meetings themselves but the 'corridor work', where you meet with the other meeting participants in private before the meeting to listen to what they have to say, and if possible, if you and they disagree, to work something out with them.

and for situations using voting and parliamentary procedure:

• if there is ever an actual vote on something, the other crucial thing is to make sure your supporters actually bother to attend the relevant meeting and vote. It's very possible that many of your supporters will think, 'oh, i figured our candidate/our position was a shoe-in, so i didn't bother coming to the meeting that week', and then for someone else to win.
• parliamentary procedure was developed for an era in which communication and meetings were difficult. But nowdays, it is more efficient to have actual discussions outside of the parliamentary procedure, and to use the parliamentary procedure as sort of a rubber stamp; the speeches within the parliamentary procedure can be used as merely a mechanism to make sure that large minorities are given a soapbox from which to broadcast their message, and also so that all factions can say something 'on the record', and also as a precise procedure to determine what the decision will be.
• often, the Chair doesn't understand and doesn't properly implement the parliamentary procedure. This can be aggravating.