Re: #06: Public resolutions

On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 09:42:49AM -0500, David Graham wrote:
> The Employmee Management (for the sake of argument) Committee passes an
> internal resolution which should be kept confidential. Because of the
> money-nature of this resolution, the Board must give its assent, and so
> it, too, must pass the same resolution. That resolution is no less
> confidential now then it was at the EMC.

I think that there is no reason to keep this from the membership.

Many boards that I'm familiar with have to publicize this. For instance,
the local school board sets salaries for each employee of the school and the
board members themselves. The public has access to all this information.

Church organizations are often run the same way. You can find out how much
the organist is getting paid if you're a member of the church. Same goes
for many other charities.

> I think it's very important that the board be left with a mechanism
> allowing it to keep resolutions secret though, as it's what you don't see
> coming that invariably gets you. Getting unanimous consent in this
> community is tremendously difficult, so requiring it is as good a
> safeguard as any against irrational or excessive use of this clause.

I'd now be prepared to accept something along these lines as a compromise.
Your point about getting unanimous consent is well-taken.

I would like to add, though, that unless this unanimous consent is attained,
that no resolution passed by the board may be considered to be enforced
until it has been published at a location where all contributing members can
see it, along with a roll call of yea/nea/abstain votes on a
per-board-member basis.

Such a place could be the SPI website or an e-mail to spi-private.

Would you like to draw up a proposed amendment or should I do that?

-- John