board77

The Last Homely Site on the Web

Handbook for the Mayor

Post Reply   Page 1 of 1  [ 1 post ]
Author Message
Mayor
Post subject: Handbook for the Mayor
Posted: Wed 24 Aug , 2005 9:53 pm
User avatar
Offline
 
Posts: 117
Joined: Sat 25 Jun , 2005 5:06 am
 
HANDBOOK FOR THE MAYOR

See Charter of B77, Article 4: The Mayor
________________________________________________________

Congratulations on your willingness to run for office as serve as Mayor of b77. You may serve in this office if you are 18 years of age or older and have been a registered member of the board for six months or longer. Your term of office runs for a full year, beginning on September 22 of one year and ending on September 21 of the following year.

All of your routine responsibilities are listed in Article 4 of the charter, but various things that fall to the Mayor are described in other Articles as well. You may call on the Loremasters for any advice concerning the Charter, but it will be helpful if you are very familiar with the Charter yourself.

Michel Delving is the Mayor’s forum and you should have sole access to the lists and letters that are maintained there. Your permissions allow you to create sticky threads and announcement threads, and you will be able to access the Sensitive Info - Mayor forum when that is created.

The official threads in that forum were posted using the screen name Mayor. When you take office, you will be given the current password for that screen name and you should then: (1) change the password to one of your own; (2) have a Ranger change the rank to your regular screen name so that newcomers will know who the Mayor is.

There is also an email account for the Mayor, but the Rangers have access to this account as well for sending out notifications on your behalf. The password to the email account changes every time the Rangers rotate and they will have to give you the new password each time this happens.

The Mayor’s job is mainly one of record keeping. All records are maintained in Michel Delving, and it will be helpful to have that forum on your screen as you read this section of the Handbook. (Two kinds of records are duplicated in the Outside Forum, discussed later.) We have tried to set up the notification process so that the Mayor only has to deal with it once a week. You should check the Mayor’s forum whenever you are on line, of course, but you should not have to compile information more than once a week.

Notifications to Members

You will have to maintain on your personal computer a list of our members and the dates when they become eligible for various activities so that they receive their notifications in timely fashion. A list like this has already been set up and will be given to you by the outgoing Mayor, but you may have to reload it into the kind of document you prefer to use, as each Mayor is likely to maintain this list in a slightly different way.

The notifications that you are required to give to members are:
• Welcome to the board
• Eligibility for the Jury Pool after 3 months and 100 posts
• Eligibility for the Ranger Pool after 6 months of “continuous, visible, and contributory presence”

Members are put on the list when they are activated, and can be taken off the list after their Ranger eligibility letter has been sent out. So the list will contain ~six months worth of member registrations at any given time.

In Michel Delving you will see a thread entitled, FORM LETTERS. These are the letters that will be sent out to members welcoming them to the board and informing them of various eligibilities.

The Mayor does not have access to member emails, so the Rangers have to send these emails when you instruct them to do so. The Rangers have the password to the Mayor’s email account and will copy and send these letters under your name. Please feel free to personalize these emails when you take office; just make sure that the essential information remains the same.

Each week, you should post in the Ranger Communication Thread a list of members who are to receive each notification that week. It takes about three days for the letters to actually go out. When the Rangers inform you that the letters have gone out, you should put that date next to the member’s name on your private list.

Welcoming New Members
At least once a week, go to the MEMBER LIST and compile a list of all new members who have joined during the past week. This is easiest if you sort the Member List by join date in Descending order.

The way the private list of the acting Mayor is set up, all other future eligibility dates are filled in at that time.

Eligibility for Jury Pool
A member becomes eligible for Jury Duty after three months and 100 posts. If you fill in their eligibility date when they first join, you will know the three-month date without referring to the Member List, but you will have to go then to the MEMBER LIST and confirm the post count.

Compile a list of eligible members and give it to the Rangers, instructing them to send Jury Pool eligibility email to these members.

Members will reply to the Mayor email account if they are interested in joining the Jury Pool. So you should also check this email account for incoming mail whenever you are online.

When a member responds positively to the email, send a reply email acknowledging and thanking them, go to the Michel Delving thread JURY POOL and enter their name and the date of their reply at the bottom of the list in the first post “Current Jury Pool” and the second post “Current Mediator Pool” if they have agreed to mediate. If they have agreed to become a Loremaster, put Loremaster in parentheses after their name.

Then go to the Jury Room and update the Second Post of the thread “How to use the Jury Room” in the same manner.

If they have agreed to be a Mediator, go to the Bike Racks and update the Second Post of the thread “How to Use the Bike Racks” in the same manner.

Eligibility for Ranger Pool

A member becomes eligible for Ranger after six months of “continuous, visible, contributory presence.” This is a judgment call on the part of the Mayor. You do not have to send an eligibility letter to every member who has been on the boards for six months. Generally, Rangers should be posters who show up regularly, frequent several forums so that they are known to the members, and are not infamous for getting into fights.

There are several mechanisms for ensuring the suitability of a member for Rangerhood.

The first mechanism is your own judgment. Someone who has been around for six months with a post count of 2 is not suitable. Someone who posted a lot in the first two months and then disappeared is not suitable.

The second mechanism is the judgment of the member. If you send an eligibility letter to a member and they don’t reply, it is not necessary to pursue them. Personal judgment enters here, too - some posters want to do it but feel shy or unqualified. If you know the poster and feel they are qualified and just need some reassurance, you should of course give them the reassurance they need. But generally we do not pursue members insisting that they perform public service.

The third mechanism is review by the membership. If you send an eligibility letter and the member responds positively, place their name and relevant information in New Entrants to the Ranger Pool. Their name remains there for ten days. If other members have an objection to this person, they will communicate it in private to you or to one of the Rangers who will pass the info along to you. It is your job to confer with the Rangers to decide whether the objection is legitimate and to discuss the deficiency with the potential Ranger. In some cases, the deficiency might be corrected - for example, if posters complain that the potential Ranger only posts in one forum, you can ask the potential Ranger to introduce themselves around the board in other forums before moving into the full Ranger pool.

If a deficiency is considered legitimate, and the potential Ranger makes efforts to correct it, the person who raised the complaint originally should be notified what has been done and informed that the potential Ranger will now be entering the pool. Potential Rangers must be given a chance to correct any objections raised against them. They cannot be removed from the Pool just because someone doesn’t like them.

Selection of Rangers is the one area where we rely heavily on the good judgment and fairness of the Mayor - to assure the qualifications of our Rangers, and to assure that the members acknowledge their qualifications and respect a Ranger’s willingness to do this job, independent of personal differences that might exist.

After ten day have expired (and any deficiencies have been corrected), the potential Ranger’s name is moved into the Rangers-in-Training Pool and their name remains there until they tell you that they feel trained and ready to enter the full Ranger pool. You should obtain confirmation of their readiness from another current Ranger.

When the member feels ready, their name is moved to Roster for Upcoming Terms of Office and placed at the bottom of the list.

Scheduling Ranger Terms of Office

Ranger terms are:
January 1 to March 31
February 1 to April 30
April 1 to June 30
May 1 to July 31
July 1 to September 30
August 1 to October 31
October 1 to December 31
November 1 to January 31

Rangers should be selected in the order in which they entered the pool; that is, start at the top of the Roster and work your way down. We try to have coverage in Europe and the U.S. and to have at least one Ranger whose native language is not English. So you may tweak the order of the list a little bit to achieve these aims, communicating thoroughly, please, with the people who are awaiting their term. Do not make a member wait more than one term for their turn if they are at the top of the list and want to serve.

Notify the member one month before their term is due to make sure they are available. If they are not available, do not move them to the bottom of the list. They remain “next in line” until they actually serve.

You will notice that some members have indicated the times of year when they are available. These are notes that you should make after the Ranger’s name whenever they inform you of availability. Please try to honor these requests.

You will notice that all relevant information about a Ranger is posted alongside their name. The way the lists are currently set up, no name is ever deleted from a post. Instead, the name with all accompanying information is moved from one post to another.

When a Ranger agrees to serve the next term of office, their name and info is cut from the Roster and pasted into Current Rangers, upcoming terms. When they begin their term, their name and info are moved within that same post from ‘upcoming’ to ‘current.’ When their term expires, their name and info are moved within that same post from ‘current’ to ‘former.’ When three months have passed since the expiry of their term, their name and info is cut from this post and returned to the bottom of the list in Roster for Upcoming Terms of Office.

As a practical matter, people are not removed from the list unless they really insist that they are leaving the board forever, or never, ever want to be a Ranger. If they are not permanently unavailable, leave them on the list and put a note beside their name that they are not currently available. Being a Ranger is voluntary, and we do not harass people to do this job, but it takes some work to gather the information and there is no reason to gather the same info from the same person multiple times if their availability is in flux. The fact that we keep the information on hand does not mean that members are forced to be a Ranger at any particular time.

The other record we maintain is Comprehensive List showing all past full Ranger terms and temp Ranger terms. When a person serves a term, simply add their name and date to this list. Note that on this list the most recent entries go on top.

It is suggested that you read carefully all the posts in the Ranger Pool Thread before attempting to manipulate the information.


Penalties, Warnings and Complaints - the Sensitive Info forum

There are no outstanding penalties or complaints at the present time and the creation of this forum is not yet ratified, so the forum does not yet exist. When it exists, it will be the job of the Mayor to create the necessary thread(s).

Penalties: The Mayor must record penalties imposed on members by a jury. The name of the member, the nature of the penalty, and the date the penalty begins and ends must be entered. It is the job of the Mayor to notify the Rangers when a penalty expires so that permissions can be restored.

If we ever reach the point where penalties are actually imposed, it will probably be the Mayor’s job to notify the member when their penalty expires and their permissions are restored.

Warnings: These are the official Warnings issued to a Ranger by the other Rangers. If three Warnings accumulate during a Ranger’s term of office, they become One Formal Complaint. Warnings that do not aggregate to a Formal Complaint expire when the term of office ends and should be removed from this list.

Formal Complaints: These are the official Formal Complaints issued to a Ranger by the other Rangers. You may wish to give these a thread of their own because Rangers will send you an email explaining the reason for the complaint, and the complaint must remain on file for nine months following the expiration of the Ranger’s term of office. During that time period, the Ranger may not serve a temp term, and it is the job of the Mayor to make sure that temps are not selected while there are outstanding complaints against them.

If one of the Rangers opposes a complaint, the complaint must be marked “Disputed” before being recorded in the Sensitive Info Forum. Any complaint that is marked “Disputed” will be deleted when the term of office expires. Disputed complaints do not prevent a member from serving as a temp Ranger.

Removal of a Ranger: If three Formal Complaints accrue against a Ranger, the Mayor should notify the other Rangers that a Hearing for Removal should be considered. If five Formal Complaints accrue against a Ranger, a Hearing for Removal must be held. It is the job of the Mayor to keep track of this and notify the other Rangers if a Hearing becomes necessary.

Please Note:: The Mayor does not create any of the information in this forum. Everything recorded here must be entered as a result of action taken by the Rangers or by a Jury.

This forum does not contain complaints by one member against another member.

If you receive a complaint from one member against another member you should: (1) refer it to the Rangers if it is a violation of the by-laws; or (2) refer the members to the Bike Racks if it is an interpersonal dispute.

The Mayor has no individual power to interfere in a dispute, enter any complaints against a member or a Ranger, or impose or record penalties on members except for those arising from Jury decisions.

Routine Privileges of the Mayor

As Mayor, you have the power to:

• call for a Binding Vote of the membership by starting a thread in the Business Room and asking for a Binding Vote committee to be formed;
• decide that the regular voting cycle (votes in the first week of the month) should be bypassed because an issue has the nature of an emergency;
• call for an Amendment to the Charter by starting a thread in the Business Room and asking for a Charter Amendment committee to be formed;
• authorize individual members to communicate on behalf of board if this is necessary; for example, if the Committees for Business Matters or Technical Matters must communicate on official business, or if we have reason to contact outside organizations such as movie production studios, advertisers, merchandise cafes, etc.;
• present any awards the board might decide to confer;
• preside at any ceremonies the board might hold.

Holding Elections

On July 20, the current Mayor will post an announcement that a nomination period will begin in 30 days.

On August 19, a 10 day nomination period will begin, extending through August 28.

When the nomination period concludes, the current Mayor will choose two helpers to be the “Election Committee” in order to design and post a ballot and hold the vote. Candidates for Mayor cannot be members of the Election committee.

On September 3, a voting thread with a ballot in the first post is started in the Business Room, and voting continues for ten full days, concluding on September 12.

The vote is counted by the Election Committee and results are posted promptly.

The current Mayor then has ten days (approximately) to exchange information with the Mayor Elect.

The Mayor Elect is inaugurated on September 22 and assumes office at that time.

_________________

WELCOME TO OUR NEWEST MEMBERS! mayor_b77@yahoo.com


Top
Profile Quote
Display: Sort by: Direction:
Post Reply   Page 1 of 1  [ 1 post ]
Return to “Threads of Historical Interest”
Jump to: