Re: [Spi-private] Publically viewable resolutions and increasing the visibility of board activity

You managed to snip the bit of my mail where I stated:
| This next section may be added to the above, but I need to check
| through our by-laws properly before it's implemented.

On Thu, Dec 28, 2006 at 06:00:29PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > This is not an amendment - see paragraph 4 or Article Five of the
> > bylaws.
>
> That seems to be for resolutions to be put to the membership directly.
> There seems no seconding requirement at present before members may
> vote on resolutions that the board refuse to consider.
>

From how I read the by-laws, there is :)

Taken from the by-laws:
"If the board decides not to consider an issue, the membership may
vote on the resolution."

Now, for a vote, I need a proposal, which brings in:
"Any proposal submitted to the secretary with N or more number of
seconds shall be put before the membership for a vote within 30 days."

One of the points of this bit is to stop the potential for a DoS on the
membership (and the secretary) on having to deal with loads of votes
from automatic vote creation.

> However, this red-tape wrangling is beside the main point: why is the
> board making member participation even more complicated?
>
> Please, improve member communication before adopting these sort of new
> rules and requirements.

The whole point of this policy is to *improve* member participation and
communication.

The only real changes from how I've been doing things are:
* resolutions must now be sent at least 48h in advance.
- Previously it's been 24h. Before I was secretary, it was none.
- 48h has been picked as it's what's specified in 2004-10-15-dbg.1 [0]
I'm happy to increase or decrease this if people think it's needed.
* Resolutions must now also be sent to a spi list.

[0] http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/resolutions/2004-10-15-dbg.1

I understand the concern over the requirement to get 20 seconds. I'll
shortly be asking the membership committee to start downgrading inactive
memberships, as this hasn't been done AFAICT. This should lead to
smaller quorum/seconding levels.

Cheers,
Neil
--
Neil McGovern
Secretary, Software in the Public Interest, Inc.