[Noisebridge-board] Investment committee

[Kelly]

I'd like to respond directly to Al's comment:
>Is anyone else troubled by how little we actually follow the actual bylaws of Noisebridge?

No, I'm only troubled by people thinking we SHOULD follow the bylaws.

I think that following the bylaws would be nice, but that we should
only do that if we change the bylaws, hopefully back to something like
we had before we went for the boilerplate. As it currently stands, I
feel very strongly that the bylaws should be eschewed whenever
possible in favor of consensus.

I have been told that someone (presumably the secretary) within the
organization can file new bylaws if we want to. I think that should
happen, and if I wasn't preoccupied with the treasury I would
spearhead it myself.

-Kelly

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 16:53, Shannon Lee <shannon at scatter.com> wrote:
> 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.
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > Board at lists.noisebridge.net
>> > https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/board
>> >
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>
>
>
> --
> Shannon Lee
> (503) 539-3700
>
> "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science."
>
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