| Grex > Coop > #337: proposal to open the membership |
| proposal to open the membership | 
Feb 10 19:25 UTC 2013 |
Proposal: Open the membership, to allow all users who can be validated to be full members of Grex and for their votes to count in all elections. Discussion: Dan Cross has suggested this in the agora conference. My intention is to propose what he has suggested. If he suggests changes to the wording of the proposal, I will almost surely them. The justifications for requiring dues are that the corporation needed the money to pay the bills, and that a financial contribution allowed for verifying the identity of the member. Those things are not issues any more. A few years ago, there was a proposal where the votes of non-paying members were counted and meaningful (or was it an election). It worked okay as I recall.
| response 1 of 43: |
Feb 10 21:02 UTC 2013 |
What by-law changes do you propose?
| response 2 of 43: |
Feb 11 03:12 UTC 2013 |
I have not gone through the by-laws to list the ones that need to be changed. Is there a definitive current set of the by-laws? If you search the WWW page, you eventually can come to a set that refers to 7 Board members and membership fees of $60 per year. Meanwhile, I hope it is okay to start the process with a general proposal.
| response 3 of 43: |
Feb 11 05:17 UTC 2013 |
"money to pay the bills" is not an issue anymore? Has Grex no costs? That's great, if true, but doesn't that mean no hardware repairs or upgrades?
| response 4 of 43: |
Feb 11 12:45 UTC 2013 |
We have bills to pay periodically. And there is always the chance that some repair is needed, even in new hardware. At some point in the future our situation might change. It would not be wise to let our bank balance run down significantly just because we (mistakenly) believe we have no expenses now.
| response 5 of 43: |
Feb 11 12:49 UTC 2013 |
Re: bylaws, what URL are you using, jep? Here is what I see when I pull
up the bylaws on our web page (under Governance):
ARTICLE 3: BOARD OF DIRECTORS
a. The Board of Directors (BOD) shall consist of five individual
members of Grex, and shall include a chairperson, a secretary, and
a treasurer.
No SEVEN member board there.
| response 6 of 43: |
Feb 11 20:42 UTC 2013 |
In coop the previous bylaws (7 directors) is item 26 and the current bylaws (5 directors) is item 325. Both versions do not say how officers are chosen, although saying three of the directors will be officers (chair, secy, treas). I suppose the implication is that they are chosen among themselves. However members can run for the Board with no intention of being officers. What happens then (perhaps, literally, nothing, as we seems to be the case)? Somehow the election process needs to ensure that there will be 3 potential officer candidates among the nominees. An alterntive is to have the Directors elect the officers from the membership, and not require that they be elected directors. If that is chosen, then it needs to be specified whether the officers do or do not have a vote on the Board (and the Directors only need to choose a chair from among themselves).
| 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.
| response 8 of 43: |
Feb 12 02:21 UTC 2013 |
re resp:5: I eventually found the bylaws by going to this site: https://www.grex.org/faq.xhtml and searching for "bylaws". I did a fair amount of searching to find anything. I didn't find a page called "Governance". Our WWW page is a efficient means of concealing information, though it looks friendly. Ah, I found "governance" on that page. It contains a link to item:2 in this conference, which includes this: ARTICLE 3: BOARD OF DIRECTORS a. The Board of Directors (BOD) shall consist of seven individual members of Grex, and shall include a chairperson, a secretary, and a treasurer. How can I get the current set of bylaws? I guess I stumbled across a different "Governance" page than you did. If you can give me a link, or a universally usable set of steps that will get me directly to the bylaws, I will probably read them.
| response 9 of 43: |
Feb 12 02:39 UTC 2013 |
https://grex.org about Cyberspace Communications Bylaws
| response 10 of 43: |
Feb 12 16:29 UTC 2013 |
I've updated the item number in the bylaws link in faq.xhtml.
| response 11 of 43: |
Feb 13 01:19 UTC 2013 |
Interesting journey, jep. I looked at the main page:
http://www.cyberspace.org/
I saw a green block, with white text, "Welcome to Grex". Below it, was a
brown box, with text about Services and "Become a Grexer." Along the right
side, another brown box had text about Accesssing, Fress Services, Help
Support, More Info, Frequently Asked Questions, and Also Cool. The section
entitled "More Info About" included Our Web Site, Our Governance, Our
Computers and Staff, and Our History. The link that is "Our Governance" took
me to a blue page that included a link to "Bylaws," which took me to
http://www.cyberspace.org/cyberspace/bylaws.shtml
So I don't know what you were looking at, nor why you could not find what you
wanted.
None of which answers my objections to the proposed change, of course.
Oh. I had a wild thought, which led me on to something interesting. I tried
http://www.grex.org/
This time, the background was blue, and the box that was on the right was
now below the scroll. It still provided the same information I found above.
We should probably make sure that both main pages use the same text and
layout.
Still, I've not seen answers to my objections above.
| response 12 of 43: |
Feb 13 01:40 UTC 2013 |
It's a width issue in the page I think. If you make the browser window too narrow, the right hand box goes below the rest of the page. I changed it to our winter colors. Next will be spring colors, then summer colors. We don't have autumn colors yet, though.
| response 13 of 43: |
Feb 13 03:41 UTC 2013 |
See if it is better now. I tweaked some of the widths and other settings a little (mainly to bring them into line with our summer pages).
| response 14 of 43: |
Feb 13 18:18 UTC 2013 |
Thanks all. I'll have to review this when I am not at work. If I can get the current by-laws, I'll post something more specific. If not, I'll ask again. I'll go through the item to answer questions, too.