Members of the Committee and Members at Large,
I am posting this here in the Jury Room and in the Business Room.
It has become increasingly clear that our Charter is too complicated. The convention committee went too far in the direction of caution and 'protected' us against many eventualities that appear, now that we have opened, unlikely to ever occur. We have a 33 page charter that people do not have the patience to read, even in summary. (And no one seems to know where the summary is. It's in Michel Delving.)
It is my personal belief that the members at large want the board to run smoothly and they want rules they can count on to protect them without inhibiting their natural creativity and posting joy. They want those rules to be enforced fairly and consistently. I believe that the Charter is fair and consistent, but if even the Rangers do not dare approach it because of its complexity, then we have defeated our own purpose.
I have gone through the whole charter over the past two days, and I believe that there are some things which are long and complicated and can simply be eliminated without harm, and that we would overwhelmingly agree that these simplifications are desirable. A readable Charter would serve us much better than what we have now.
There are other things that probably should be changed but are likely to stir considerable debate.
So I would like to propose the following:
• the current committee is not supposed to disband until the ratification vote is complete and the results have been archived. Some committee members have already left, and some are weary of working on this issue. I would like to allow members to depart at this time, if they want to, and for new members to join (up to 13) who are interested in working on obvious simplifications of the Charter.
• the agenda I propose is given below. In my opinion, the 'simple' changes can be agreed upon and executed within one week. I have already prepared simplified text that highlights the few issues that are significant changes from currrent procedure and would require discussion. If we can reach a decision on those few points, we can eliminate 10 pages from the charter with almost no fuss.
• the difficult articles I propose we save for the new year. We would leave this committee convened but allow another rotation of the members after January 1 so that people particularly interested in amending the Ranger and Dispute by-laws could join at that point, and people who don't want to be involved in more difficult amendments could leave.
This amendment committee was formed under Article 3, and we have the right to address anything we consider relevant to the recent recurring problems that led to the use of Extraordinary Powers. It is my opinion that we should seize this opportunity to make the Charter more member-friendly and avoid a situation in the future where the membership is unsure how to handle a problem simply because the Charter itself is so complicated.
Here is the proposed Agenda for Simplifying the Charter. The actual textual simplifications that I will propose will be outlined in a second agenda once we have a committee formed.
Proposed Simplification of:
1. Key Principles
• reduce these to their one word headers.
2. Ownership of Board77
• eliminate. No longer relevant, and may impede us if and when we decide to move.
3. By-Laws
Article 7: Binding Votes
Article 12: Amendments to the Charter
Article 11: Standing Committees and Ad Hoc Committees
• Eliminate the elaborate requirements for composition of committees. and who can start committees. Especially eliminate the requirement that the Mayor serve on every committee. Eru doesn’t want to do this and why should she have to?
• Simplify the size requirements for committees and make them all the same
• Get rid of the elaborate quorum thing and just set a percentage of people who have to vote in order for the vote to count
• If committee composition is simplifed we can get rid of Article 11 completely.
• Add to Article 12 - the one provision we need to simplify our lives: Loremasters by 2/3 agreement can make the cosmetic changes needed for consistency without a member vote.
Article 3: Rangers (administrators)
Article 5: Dispute Resolution in the Outside Forum
• These are the only two articles that might generate significant discussion and disagreement. We can rotate this amendment committee again before dealing with them if people wish so.
People who are interested in working on this should sign up in in this thread. If you want to leave the Jury Room committee at this point, please say so here as well so that I can keep track of the number of members.
Thank you.
Jn
Committee that's forming: Jnyusa, TED, Alatar, Fixer, Prim, Lidless, Voronwe, TheMary, Elian, Eru (still needed at this point)
Room for 3 more members. Committee will start meeting on January 2