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Grex > Coop > #337: proposal to open the membership | |
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| Author |
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jep
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proposal to open the membership
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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.
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| 43 responses total. |
kentn
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response 1 of 43:
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Feb 10 21:02 UTC 2013 |
What by-law changes do you propose?
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jep
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response 2 of 43:
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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.
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rcurl
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response 3 of 43:
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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?
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kentn
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response 4 of 43:
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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.
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kentn
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response 5 of 43:
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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.
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rcurl
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response 6 of 43:
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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).
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gelinas
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response 7 of 43:
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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.
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jep
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response 8 of 43:
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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.
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