Transparency and Feedback

Greetings AMP Community,

Last week, I posted on one of the music committee's most successful reforms of the past year: a new schedule that emphasized multiple medium-sized shows rather than one large show. Stay tuned, I have some exciting news on that front that will be made public within the next few days.

Today's blog post focuses on an area in which we were significantly less successful. We began the year with a commitment to more purposefully collecting campus feedback and acting upon it. For reasons partly within and partly without of our control, we have been unsuccessful in our attempt.

As my last blog post alluded to, there has been a perceived disconnect between the campus and the music committee for several years. On the music committee, we have always assumed that this causes frustration only because we cannot effectively communicate the restraints acting upon us. If the campus knew how difficult it was to draw impressive bands to campus, the theory goes, then we could have a more meaningful dialogue about how to proceed. So, our effort to address problems of feedback and transparency was rooted first in educating the community as to the complicated system we work within, and second to create an outlet for a meaningful dialogue to begin.

In order to do this, we created a Facebook Forum. In the forum, we explained how our booking process works, updated with every offer we put in to a band, and accepted feedback from the community. Every week, a new committee member was assigned to monitor the forum and respond to all comments. In theory, this was an adequate solution, but in practice it reached too few students and lead neither to a widespread understanding of how we function nor an engaged dialogue. At best, numbers for the group hovered around 150 and participation was sparse.

Though the facebook forum was a good start, we should have broadened our scope and diversified our methods of outreach if we were to fundamentally change the nature of the relationship between the music committee and the community. Campus newspaper editorials, online polls, feedback stands at each of our events: many tactics such as these could have been combined with the forum to create a more sustained discussion between the music committee and community.

This, however, would take serious swathes of time. As with any programming committee, the music committee faces multiple tasks that have to be prioritized in order for the group to function successfully. In the end, we decided to focus on booking, publicizing, planning, and running our events. As chair, sometimes the most difficult realization is knowing that your committee is a group of unpaid students, who cannot devote every hour of every day to AMP. If we had infinite time, I would have been thrilled to more drastically overhaul the feedback process; in the end, though, I am happy we chose to prioritize booking and hosting successful shows.

Next week: how we reformed the tasks that committee members do across the year.

-Sean O'Mealia