eMeeting: A more organized way to manage board meetings in Kentucky

KSBA eMeeting Team

One of the more interesting presentations at the February 1, 2012 meeting of the Kentucky Board of Education was offered by the Kentucky School Boards Association’s (KSBA) ‘eMeeting’ team.

eMeeting is a computer-based meeting support program for groups like local and state boards of education. It allows automated development of the meeting agenda and support documents and then allows entry of meeting minutes in real time as the meeting is actually held.

eMeeting can capture personal notes from individual board members in a not-for-public view file as the meeting progresses. That is a nice way for board members to insure they don’t forget questions that come to mind before or during the meeting.

eMeeting also has an automated process to capture the votes on issues on a member-by-member basis.

At the close of the meeting, a draft set of minutes is ready for the board members to immediately review for accuracy while events are still fresh in their minds. This is potentially a much better process than the old, manual method where draft minutes are mailed to board members days or weeks after the event.

The KSBA eMeeting team reports that around 60 local school boards in Kentucky are already using their system, which is KSBA-developed.

The Kentucky Board of Education will now consider adopting eMeeting or possibly one of the other products now available on the market. It sounds like eMeeting or a similar computer-based system could add a lot of transparency and efficiency to the operation of the Kentucky Board of Education, and it will be of great benefit to the board’s support staff, as well.

Other boards and similar government groups around Kentucky might want to look into this new software development, as well. The ability to improve the technical support to the many boards that operate in this state would add transparency and efficiency to those boards’ operations, as well.