mystery meeting #sol18

No plan today: I can't count on my inner owl to come to the rescue because I'm off to community meeting this evening and can't count on the writing level coherence to blog later. The coherence needed for writing runs low as I tire, which comes upon me increasingly earlier and with less provocation. With no flight plan and too early for owls to be out, rambling on (on a wild goose chase, flying blind) about the day is my last resort.

Note the confluence of flying or feathered images. Do I have a potential theme here, a metaphor to stretch to a breaking point before crashing?

The meeting itself, hosted by the Colorado Health Foundation and described as a Community Dialog, was something of a mystery: no notice was published or posted locally but went out by closed email list. I heard about the meeting topic and the date at second hand but not the time or location. Another area meeting with a similar name was scheduled for just a few days later and publicly announced. The events seemed as though they might or should be connected but weren't. Not knowing made me all the more determined to suss it out.

I even tweeted out a question (unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, misaddressed), "where today is your scheduled #YumaColorado Conversation being held? Why hasn't it been posted publicly for max info distribution & #healthequity transparency?"
After finally sorting out information by Messenger and getting my name on the invitation list, I asked for and got a ride to the meeting at the Yuma Community Center, interested to see who was on the list and suss out why it was less public than the other local "conversation" meeting. The organization (RPD) hosting in Sterling has an public Facebook Event page that I shared to Manor page. I still wondered why one was so much more public than the other. Searching the tubz high and low for digital traces Yuma, yielded none.

The appearance of avoiding transparency raises red flags for me. In this case, however, information gaps were the unintended consequence of unrelated communication missteps. The Foundation intended to make meeting access more public but there may not have been a procedure in place to do it. There were problems with the registration software. I should have subscribed to email news which would have put me on for their mailing list but did not in protest of the absence of rss to subscribe to and the inherent intrusion of mailing list notices and appeals as too often used. Since the event worked off of a "guest list" I couldn't really announce it as a public event.

Outcome: a good discussion, a opportunity to meet others of like interests and community goals, bring attention to info speed bumps (including rss deficit) now more likely to be attended to and, most important, put human faces on the foundation. In other words...

Mystery Solved

Irresistible xkcd "mystery solved" strip ~ read more of them at https://xkcd.com/

(sorry, saw the airplane, "mystery" in the title and couldn't resist)