[Noisebridge-discuss] Bylaws!

[Paul Böhm]

One more thing:

I'd rather have everyone join as a member and elect a much smaller
board of directors. Voting for someone as a director is also voting
for a particular vision. Visions can change, that's why it's good to
have a broad member base who can vote for new directors at least once
a year, or on special occasions.

More than 3 Directors really is bad - you can't get a straight vision
that way. To stay in software engineering terms - that's like design
by committee. Just because you can't decide who should run the place,
doesn't mean a committee would be better. The job of the board is to
moderate - you just can't have a huge board moderate. If all the major
stakeholders (and it's bad enough to already define those as fixed)
are already in the board, all you can do is vote - since noone can
take the role of moderating the process anymore. If you have a small
board that is easy to kick, they can't do politics - they really need
the support of the members - thus they'll moderate, not make policy.

Have everyone involved in the project become a member, let them pay
some nominal fee (20 Euro here), and then vote for a
moderator/director plus one or two additional directors for finances,
and let those make decisions together.

Also if any of you speak german, here are our bylaws:
http://metalab.at/wiki/images/3/36/Metalab_statuten.pdf
(or as tex: http://metalab.at/wiki/Bild:Metalab_statuten.tex)

and a terribly translated version here:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2F77.244.247.3%2Fmetastat%2F&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8
(sorry)

Quite a lot of thought went into these, and your legal requirements
don't seem to be all that different (and the legal parts have been the
least important actually)

Paul

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 2:30 AM, Paul Böhm <paul at boehm.org> wrote:
> Hrm,
>
>  I'd strongly suggest a more conventional approach to members.
>
>  If you don't have members things can quickly turn autocratic, and i've
>  actually, not just theoretically, seen exactly that kill prior
>  attempts to start labs in Vienna.
>
>  OTOH We (at metalab) haven't experienced any problems whatsoever with
>  having legal members with voting rights and power over the board.
>
>  You should still give the final say in all issues to the board, but
>  you should make it really easy to kick the board too. That way people
>  get power not through titles, but through respect. The easier to get
>  rid of the board, the more powerful good leaders become through trust
>  and respect.
>
>  Thus I wouldn't strip the board of their right to make decisions
>  either. They're there for just that - as a sanity check. If you don't
>  like their policies you can ask for a mistrust vote (requiring just
>  10% of the members to ask for the vote, and 50.1% to approve it), and
>  elect new leaders. It's not theirs to make the decisions, but if they
>  are meant to be moderating the process they need to have decision
>  making powers for the day to day business, at least until someone
>  feels they're abusing that position (not moderating but pushing their
>  own policies) and someone else should continue.
>
>  paul
>
>
>
>  On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 1:21 AM, Rachel McConnell <rachel at xtreme.com> wrote:
>  > Argh, proofread three times and then after sending I find the Big
>  >  Unclear thing.
>  >
>  >
>  >  Rachel McConnell wrote:
>  >  > I don't know how we'd officialize it.  We did discuss the idea that the
>  >  > board would always have to approve any proposal by a member (again:
>  >
>  >  What I meant here is that anything a member proposed to the board would
>  >  be required by our bylaws to get approved (if it wasn't illegal,
>  >  impossible, etc), NOT that any proposal would have to be sent through
>  >  the board for approval.  Restriction on the board, not the members.
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  >  R
>  >  _______________________________________________
>  >  Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
>  >  Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>  >  https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>  >
>