The Organization that I am apart of at Cornell that I am most connected to is my fraternity, Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Incorporated. The Cognitive system includes the 5 current members of the Organization including me. We are a social, predominantly African American Organization that is founded on the principles of Brotherhood, Scholarship and Service. Our goals are to create programs that support Bigger Better Business, Social Action, and Education, while creating strong bonds amongst ourselves as brothers.
Our internal representations are the new ideas that we come up with everyday for creating effective programming as well as fundraisers to fund the programs we create. The external Representations that we have can be found on Google Docs as well as a few different hard drives. The Google Docs keeps track of past events, attendance, people we contacted in order to make the program a success, and the amount of money it took to create the program. On the separate hard drives we have fliers, minutes, agendas and copies of paperwork that can be referred to in the future.
If I were to describe my group I would say that we were a tightly coupled group. Everything we do as a chapter of our organization must go under heavy discussion and elaboration before we even take the first step. We have weekly meetings where share any new ideas that we may have on new and effective programming as well as give status updates on the programs that are under development already. It is an effective way to develop programming with group constant group input every step of the way.
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Nice post. Since the cognitive system is comprised of a small, tightly-knit group of members, there can be lots of close discussions and every member can contribute more. The internal representations seem to set the foundation for the external representations, which actually carry out the ideas for fundraisers and programs. It would be interesting to see if other fraternities that may have more members can still incorporate the ideas of all members as well.
ReplyDeleteAs a member of the Panhellenic sorority, I found your post so interesting. As you might know, Panhellenic organizations usually have anywhere from 100-150 members, so obviously a lot of planning is involved in order to have successful programming. I had always assumed that in smaller organizations planning did not have to be so careful since you don't have to consider quite so many people. I can see I was wrong! I like that you are able to use internal representations more efficiently than we are, and that your external representations are more frequently used by members.
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