2020 UAC Retrospective

Owned by Lydia Tang (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jul 17, 2020
3 min read

By Lydia Tang (UAC Chair, December 2019-June 31, 2020)

The UAC did a lot of important behind-the-scenes work this year to build a strong and evolving foundation. In close collaboration with TAC Chair Maggie Hughes, I developed extensive procedural documentation:

  • Chair and Vice Chair Responsibilities

  • Yearly Timeline

  • Notes on running meetings

  • Onboarding new members

  • Email templates

  • 2020 Work plan

  • UAC Responsibilities and Expectations

We established the Usability subteam and sunsetted the Reports subteam, to meet evolving needs of the program. We also (spearheaded by UAC Vice Chair Brittany Newberry) laid the groundwork for a new Member Engagement subteam for the 2020-2021 season.

We experimented with issuing a placement survey at the beginning of the term and integrated all subteams with TAC and UAC members according to member interest and need, while still maintaining the traditional reporting lines of the subteams to UAC or TAC.

For continuity of working files, we established a UAC/TAC google drive with documentation on best practices for using it.

In more closely aligning with TAC approaches, we adopted the practice of creating retrospectives at the end of the season, which hopefully will allow incoming Council members and leadership to quickly pick up where work left off, identify pain points, and areas for future collaboration/coordination.

Challenges this year:

The UAC format and meeting style has been relatively rigid for several years. The UAC meets every two months and the UAC chair traditionally has all subteams report on accomplishments during the timeframe. Drawbacks of this approach have been that there are no actual action items for the Council meetings, which result in low attendance. Since the subteam leaders traditionally do the reporting, it is perceived as a hierarchical “chilly” climate and attendees are reticent to speak up to ask questions or engage in dialogue.

Considerations for the future:

For the last two or so years, TAC has taken a more flexible approach to meeting once per month from July/August - December, and then meeting every two months for the remainder of the season. The benefit of this is that newer Council members feel more oriented to the Council and subteam work. Council meetings usually feature a subteam to lead an interactive discussion. The UAC had hoped to transition to monthly meetings in this past year, but with established expectations of meeting once every two months, there was a concern about increasing the time commitment mid-stream.

The UAC chair participates in the Nominating committee. At this year’s nominating committee, it was determined that people who were nominated by someone else should be solicited for their own statements of interest to best represent them as candidates. Hopefully this will be followed up on next year. Additionally, there was unresolved questions on criteria for selecting Governance Board representatives. It’s still a very subjective process, which might be good to clarify in the future.

The UAC chair needs to check in with subteam leaders at least twice a year to encourage them to share if there are any concerns with their subteam, particularly regarding extended absences and non-participation. While we are all volunteers, some council members in the past were not present for over three months, which essentially takes a spot from someone else who might be able to contribute more fully. Occasional scaling back is completely fine, but just not for multiple months at a time.

Additional documentation on wiki records management of “historical files” and organization would also be helpful.

As described earlier, this has been a productive year for the UAC, laying the groundwork for exciting work in the coming year. Wishing everyone the very best and looking forward to seeing all of the great things ahead!

Lydia