Overview

ParliPro is an interactive tool to conduct meetings using Robert's Rules of Order in realtime.

With ParliPro, meeting organizers can keep order during a meeting and ensure that everyone, including an audience, knows what is happening at all times.

Motivation

Robert's Rules of Order (Newly Revised) is a system of parlimentary procedure used by many deliberative bodies throughout the United States. It is often used by student governments (and often fraternities and sororities) to govern the rules in meetings and of its members. As the secretary (and de jure parlimentarian) for the Student Senate at The University of Texas at Dallas, I learned a great deal about how to run meetings. I also learned how annoying and messy meetings could get if people did not understand what was going on.

Although the Robert's Rules framework is flexible and appropriate for the legislative body of a student government, its verbose and opinionated nature often confuses freshman and even veteran senators. We would often spend 20 minutes (in a two-hour meeting, mind you) debating and clarifying parlimentary procedure of a motion because someone misunderstood what was said or simply wasn't paying attention.

During the 2022-2023 Senate term, I wanted to use my web development skills to create a tool for running modern meetings subject to the constraints of parlimentary procedure. I designed and built ParliPro instead of doing homework because I was bored one week and kept having nightmares (/s) about people not understanding Robert's Rules and feeling embarassed that my student government couldn't efficiently run meetings.

While this tool was never used in production due to a lack of buy-in from our student government's leadership, I point to it as an example of my approach to building software that's not only idealistic but also practical.

Features

Current Motion Companion View

For meetings that use an overhead projector, the chairperson or parlimentarian can open a full screen companion view in a web browser that the parlimentarian can update in realtime.

Meeting Links and Archives

Meeting participants can follow along using meeting links generated by the chair or parlimentarian. Records for these meetings can be viewed publicly even after the meeting concludes.

Exporting motions

Meeting organizers can export a list of all motions after a meeting from the chairperson view to a plain text file, useful for preparing the official minutes.