Nomination for SPI Bylaws Committee

Hello. Please consider this my official self-nomination for the SPI
Bylaws committee. I have significant experience relevant to working on
bylaws revisions and clarifications, although I am not a lawyer. For
just about all of my life I have enjoyed working with and learning about
forms, laws, rules, regulations, and the like. One recent manifestation
of this is in the constitution for the Brown (University) Linux Users
Group, which I wrote nearly by myself (basing it on the LUG constitution
at Rice University) in September. (The group is now an official Brown
student group with wide-ranging undergraduate, graduate student, and
staff support.) Archives of the mailing list from the pre-planning days
of March 2002 until partway through October 2002 are available at
http://kaplowitz.org/mailman/listinfo/brownlug , and archives of the
mailing list thereafter are at
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?S1=blug-discuss .

My goals for the bylaws committee are to fix the several unclear bits of
the bylaws, clarify the definition of a meeting (and in so doing provide
a better basis in the bylaws for email voting), and provide for better
accountability to the membership on the part of board members. The basic
structure of the bylaws seems fine to me; I don't currently think that a
major revamping is necessary, but numerous details need to be clarified,
and some typographical details (such as the use of numerals versus the
use of number words) need to be made consistent. I will be a
second-semester student at Brown University starting on the 22nd, but I
should still have time to participate sufficiently actively in the
bylaws committee discussions via email. I will have a reasonable degree
of flexibility in when I can attend any regularly scheduled meetings,
but I would want to know about them in advance and some blocks of time
will not be available due to classes and such. I am also on IRC
frequently as Hydroxide, as several of you probably already know.

- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy(at)debian(dot)org