Friends,
I do not usually approach the Charter text in this manner, looking for the trend in the general discussion and then writing the whole text as one piece. The only other time this was done was for the Outside Forum stickies and even there we had a lot of subtopic discussions in separate threads.
But I am running out of time to devote to this, and I am disheartened by the lack of participation by any but a few members on any particular issue, and the tendency of the current committee to do something which the last committee also did, which is to re-argue from the beginning too many things that the members had already decided adequately (imo).
We have a current procedure which, in my opinion, only needs to be modified, not rewritten in its entirety. Of course we can argue 24 hour notification versus 48 hour notification for three pages (for example), but such details have been argued already and I’ve been doing almost nothing but guiding such discussions since the beginning of February. I much prefer that we focus on things that have not been decided yet and make sure that the various articles are consistent with one another. When the Charter is put into practice, our errors will emerge quickly enough and we can amend them at that time.
THEREFORE, I am using this thread to post a complete procedure. All the text in black is current procedure which I can see no compelling reason to change. The new suggestions are in blue. In red are the matters of principle that really do need discussion and decision by this committee.
Each paragraph is in a separate post.
I would like to do something novel and earth-shattering - discuss these things until you arrive at consensus, make whatever changes are agreed upon, and then vote each procedural paragraph up or down in its entirety.
Jn
p.s. this is a lot of material so it may take me about 30 minutes to edit everything in.