Dear Members (and especially our newest members),
It is time once again to ratify a piece of our Charter.
HERE IS HOW THE PROCESS WORKS
All registered members may discuss and vote in this thread.
A summary of the Article we are voting on is given below. There are also links to the post containing the full and complete text of the Article.
Before voting, we discuss in this thread for a minimum of ten days. During those ten days, you should state bluntly in this thread anything you don’t like. If enough people dislike certain provisions, we will remove them from the text before the voting begins and allow the committee to work on them again until they are more acceptable to the membership.
At the end of the discussion, the vote opens and remains open for ten days, two weekends inclusive. The vote takes the form of a poll in this thread, where you vote either yes or no to approve these pieces of the Charter.
This vote started late and will remain open until Monday, August 8, 11:59 pm Greenwich Mean Time.
(Translation: voting from July 22, ~8:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time or ~5:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time until August 1, ~8:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time or ~5:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time. )
SUMMARY OF ARTICLE 11: STANDING AND AD HOC COMMITTEES
The full text of the article can be read IN THIS POST.
There are certain things for which we know that committees will be needed in the future. In some cases, those committees might be needed on short notice.
Rather than wait until the committee is needed and then hold a vote of the membership to form the committee and define its scope, we are using this Article to authorize a couple committees in advance, define their scope and their composition, and lay out the procedure for convening them so that this can be done quickly when needed.
The committees are not actually formed now, they are simply authorized to form as needed.
The first two such committees are the Committee to Amend the Charter, ¶1 and the Committee for Binding Votes, ¶2.
Amending the Charter should be self-explanatory. Binding Vote are votes taken by the membership, the results of which the Board must follow. We have taken two votes recently that might be considered Binding Votes - the vote to open the board and the vote on what to do with threads. We took those votes without having any rules about how to conduct them, whereas the Charter will now tell us how to do this in the future.
The outline for these two committees is a bit more complicated than for the other committees because voting by the membership is a process that should be carefully protected.
I will also warn you in advance that the rules for these committees are tied to other Articles that have not yet been presented for Ratification. The Committee to Amend the Charter must follow the Article on Charter Amendments, Article 12, ¶2, which we are now writing. The Committee for Binding Votes must follow the Article on Binding Votes and Initiatives of the Membership, Article 7, which we have written but are now amending and have not yet presented for Ratification.
There are a couple articles that deal with interrelated issues, and we are working on them in committee to make them consistent with one another. It might be that some of the detailed text you read here will end up being moved into a companion Article for consistency, but the provisions will not change. They will simply appear in a different place, and you will have the opportunity to ratify that move. Note: at 7:50 pm GMT on Tuesday, July 11 (~four hours before discussion begins officially) I did remove details about the Amendment Committee from this Article and placed them in Article 12, ¶2 where you will have opportunity to ratify them in less than a week. You can still read them by clicking on the link above to Article 12, but you do not need to ratify them right now. This was done so that the Charter will present everything about voting in a consistent fashion, and it will be easier for the members to compare while ratifying the two Articles (7 and 12) that concern voting. Jn
For now, we would like to get the authorization for all these committees ratified.
The rules concerning Amendments and Binding Votes are not the same, but the rules for the Committees that handle these votes are basically the same.
Both Amendments and Binding votes can be initiated by:
• the Mayor, or
• two Rangers, or
• five registered members regardless of status.
Anyone who wants a Binding Vote taken on some issue, or feels the Charter needs amending, only has to start a thread in the Business Forum asking for this. As soon as the Mayor or two Rangers or any four other members step up and agree, a committee will be formed to guarantee the appropriateness of the vote (according to the rules of the companion Article), create the ballot, post the ballot and count and report the results.
Charter committees are also automatically convened if a Ranger exercises Extraordinary Powers under Article 5, ¶5 because this action suggests that our Charter fails to cover something important. Such a case is in progress right now in the Bike Racks and Jury Room, for those of you interested in how these things might end up working: Reopening Discussion.
Any registered member can be a member of these committees and volunteers will be taken in order until the committee is filled and has the required composition.
The other committees authorized by this Article are fairly straightforward.
There is an Election Committee, ¶3 authorizing the current Mayor to select two helpers for devising the Mayoral election ballot and conducting the vote.
There is a Committee for Technical Support, ¶4 composed of three members who know enough about computers to talk to our webhost and/or advise our members about our internet capabilities if that becomes necessary.
And there is a Committee for Business Matters, ¶5 that will manage the business interface with our web host and implement our potential move to a new board. The is the only committee authorized to convene upon ratification, as we expect that moving to a new web host will be the next major issue that we undertake.
In general, all committees may use the Jury Room for their deliberations but companion threads should be run in the Business Forum so that members can follow along. All member votes must be held in the Business Forum.
Finally, we have specified that all other committees be formed as Ad Hoc Committees, ¶6 whenever a majority of Rangers agree that a committee is needed and the issue is not covered by a standing committee. An example of an Ad Hoc committee would be the Grand Opening Celebration committee led by Mossy and Pips.
In order to ratify this Article, 39 members must cast votes, and of those who vote, two-thirds (67%) must vote in favor.