MoveOn agenda house parties--your experience?

I was disappointed. Mine started at 7:00 on the dot and went around the room having (approximately twenty) people say their names and towns. A rah-rah call from one of the directors, and then groups of three listed a few goals. Back to the large group, each person got to nominate one goal and talk for less than a minute. I threw my support behind someone else's "fair and accurate elections", saying that I really wanted "hand-counted paper ballots" because machines even with trails and audits cannot be trusted, but I didn't want to split the vote.

We then were told to vote for three (out of about fifteen), and the top-three vote-getters would be passed along to the big cheeses. Someone asked if they could put their three votes behind the same thing; people laughed but the leader said yes. So I cast three votes for "fair and accurate elections". It still only came in fourth, behind alternative energy, affordable health care and (one vote behind) publicly financed elections.

It was now 8:00 and the very nice host said that Move On said it could only go an hour. So people picked up the snacks they had brought which no one even had time to eat and left! No getting to know anybody, no exchange of ideas in any depth, just now let the head honchos handle it...

A guideline I understand, but why not give people an option to talk further after the "official" get together is done? I guess you always have that option anyway, but still...

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We may have cheated a bit, we went over the hour...We had 12 people, we weren't told that we could use all of our votes for one item. We did have one gentleman vote for every issue. He could not decide on three.

Our top three were:
Out of Iraq by 07
Universal access to healthcare
Accurate, auditable, reliable elections - so we covered this for you! :)

and when I went to the MoveOn website (I was a host) they wanted me to type in ALL of the suggested goals, in order of vote getting.

Did you not listen to the conference call? They mentioned it there.

Also - I had no idea it wasn't supposed to run over an hour. We sat around and talked politics and ate and drank and really got to know each other. We have plans to meet up again soon.

Don't tell MoveOn - I don't want to get sent to Liberal ISS!!

Also - in the "rules" I got, you can only vote for one idea one time.

Take care, and maybe you can find a different host next time.

(on edit: I just went over the party "guidelines" again - and it says "Wrap-Up" after an hour, it doesn't say that you have to end it then.)

...and wanted to get rid of everyone before "Survivor" came on...