[Noisebridge-board] Investment committee

[Shannon Lee]

When Noisebridge set out to get 501c3 status, we went to a great deal of
trouble to write bylaws which matched our actual governance process
(consensus &c).  We spent a lot of time and money going back and forth with
lawyers &c before finding out that the fast way to get approved is to use
boilerplate bylaws; we did that, and it worked (I only saw the end of this
process, Rachel or Andy may have more insight into the whole thing).

In other words, our actual bylaws have nothing to do with our governance
process and never have.  Referring to the bylaws for "how Noisebridge does
X" is only true to the extent that there are some things that legally must
happen according to what's in them, but mostly we use our founding
governance process, which predates my participation or any space, or the
bylaws.

In practice, the board has picked officers, and then submitted the choice to
the consensus process.  This is largely because the hard part of picking
someone is *finding a competent person who is willing to do it* and then
browbeating them into actually doing it, rather than choosing from amongst a
number of candidates (hah).

Because this process does not match the process in the bylaws and is not
exactly consistent with the rest of our consensus process, it has caused
misunderstandings and bad feelings in the past.  It may be time to
re-convene our Process committee and hammer out the Right Way once and for
all...

--S

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Albert Sweigart <asweigart at gmail.com>wrote:

> Is anyone else troubled by how little we actually follow the actual
> bylaws of Noisebridge? For example, it doesn't mention anything about
> consensus and says we take a majority vote on issues put to the
> membership.
>
> -Al
>
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 3:12 PM, Dr. Jesus <j at hug.gs> wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Danny O'Brien <danny at spesh.com> wrote:
> >> That sounds like an idea.
> >>
> >> In other news, shouldn't we be shambling toward the
> >> nomination/consensus process for the executive officers?
> >>
> >> Somebody remind me what the process here is: I remember it all ending
> >> with a pseudo-random allocation of Jof, but I also vaguely recall
> >> nominations being board-initiated.
> >
> > It was a regular membership meeting if I remember correctly, but there
> > was too much booze for any decisions which were made to be rational.
> >
> > The bylaws say that the board elects the officers, full stop.  How
> > much the membership should be involved is up to the board.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Board mailing list
> > Board at lists.noisebridge.net
> > https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/board
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Board mailing list
> Board at lists.noisebridge.net
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>



-- 
Shannon Lee
(503) 539-3700

"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science."
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