response 7 of 43:

Feb 12 00:38 UTC 2013

I do not support opening the membership to verified users.  One of the tests
of the viability of the organisation is the support of the membership.  Not
just financially but in service, too.  We lowered the number of Directors to
make it easier for the membership to support the Board.

The conference system is not the entirety of grex, or of Cyberspace
Communications, Inc.  However, it is the linchpin of the governance of both.
People who do not participate in the conferencing system cannot affect the
governance.  Including them as 'members' will not inspire them to vote, to
run for election as a Director, or in any other way to support the
organisation.  All it will do is increase the number of members, making it
even harder to get anything done.  I was going to say, "Achieve a quorum,"
but the only only thing for which a quorum is required is to bring proposals
to a vote: ten percent of the current membership must approve voting on a
proposal.  We currently have some four thousand users.  If we make even one
tenth of them members, we need forty "ayes" in this item to bring the
proposal to a vote.  The good news: they wouldn't become members until after
the proposal passed.  Since the voter list tsty provided for the election had
sixteen names, we only need two 'ayes' to take the matter to a vote right
now.

As a side note: I consider the experiment of non-local Directors to have
failed.  We have not been able to get them to meet, and the Treasurer, at
least, must be local to Ann Arbor, to check the mail and the bank.  If the
only local Director does not have the time to be the Treasurer, the
Corporation is in trouble.  As we can all plainly see.