By-law Amendment concerning concurrent proposals

Jan 27 16:17 UTC 2004

From the current Grex By-laws:

       ARTICLE 5:  VOTING PROCEDURES
  
   a.  Any member of Grex may make a motion by entering it as the
       text of a discussion item in a computer conference on Grex
       designated for this purpose.  The item is then used for
       discussion of the motion.  All Grex users may participate in
       the discussion.  No action on the motion is taken for two
       weeks.  At the end of two weeks, the author may then submit a
       final version for a vote by the membership.  The vote is
       conducted on-line over a period of ten days.
 
   b.  A motion will be considered to have passed if more
       votes were cast in favor than against, except as provided
       for bylaw amendments.
 
   c.  For voting purposes, a day will run midnight to midnight.  In
       the event of continuous system downtime of 24 hours or more,
       the voting period will be adjusted to compensate.
  
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Proposal:
 
   Let Article 5 of the Grex by-laws be amended by the addition
   of section (d) with subsections (1) and (2) as follows:

   d.  In the event that more than one member motion is made within
       the same calendar day, the voteadm may, at his or her 
       discretion, delay the beginning of the voting period for any 
       of the concurrent motions, subject to the following 
       limitations:

       1. The order in which the motions were posted to the proper
          Grex conference shall be correctly mirrored by the order
          in which the motions are opened for voting, subject to
          timely availability of the final wording for each motion.
          Exception shall be made for simultaneous voting periods.

       2. No more than one day shall elapse between the openings of
          voting on successive motions, subject to reasonable delays
          due to technical or implementation issues.
       

response 2 of 14:

Jan 27 16:24 UTC 2004

A few points:

This amendment addresses a specific scenario not allowed for within the 
current by-law structure.

It does so NOT BY MANDATING, but by giving the voteadm DISCRETION to 
deal with concurrent, possibly conflicting proposals in a way which 
removes any reasonable doubt from the manner in they should be 
considered and implemented, thus rendering entirely moot the issue of 
whether successive proposals are made within minutes or within years of 
each other, and allowing later proposals to cleanly supercede earlier 
ones without raising procedural problems.

response 4 of 14:

Jan 27 16:42 UTC 2004

That's pretty much why it's a non-issue.  Even now, someone can 
delay as long as they want the beginning of voting on their own 
proposal merely by failing to finalize the wording, and if two 
people want to delay indefinitely, then their proposals will never 
come up for vote.

The voteadm is not obligated to do anything with a motion until the 
final wording is available, which is at the first time after the 
mandated discussion period is over that the proposer declares the 
wording to be finalized.  (Which means that the voteadm is free to, 
and possibly obligated to ignore any announced changes to the 
wording of a proposal after that point.)

response 6 of 14:

Feb 10 17:48 UTC 2004

Today is two weeks since the posting of this proposal.
I'm surprised by the lack of discussion, but I suppose that just means 
it really isn't very controversial...

response 8 of 14:

Feb 10 18:30 UTC 2004

The original phrasing is final.

response 10 of 14:

Feb 11 13:52 UTC 2004

I'll wait.  It can't hurt to at least see what you've got to offer, 
and it could save us all some time and energy.

response 12 of 14:

Feb 12 21:57 UTC 2004

(Will post my proposal tomorrow morning...)

response 14 of 14:

May 17 02:14 UTC 2006

TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE