bylaws status (was Re: [Noisebridge-discuss] naming)

[Andy Isaacson]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 06:24:17PM -0700, Al Billings wrote:
> Was a draft of the by-laws completed yesterday?

We made progress, but there's still work to do.  They're up on the wiki
and the edit history tells a bit of the story:
https://www.noisebridge.net/index.php/Bylaws

There are several issues at work here:
 - we started from Carol's bylaws, which were set up for a nonmembership
   corporation.  We've decided to go with a single class of members
   electing the board.
 - we're ending up taking input from other bylaws found on the 'net,
   which have a wide variety of in-depthness.  Just for comparison,
   consider Article 6 sections 10-22 (!!) from
http://www.insightcced.org/uploads///publications/legal/mbylawsmember.pdf
   versus Article IV of
http://www.cirgis.org/docs/CIRGIS_Corporate_Bylaws.pdf
   -- they cover the same material, but one takes 8 pages and the other
   just one page.

I'm hoping that since we seem to have some consensus as to the direction
to go, we can use the Power of the Internet to speed up this process.
As it stands, /Bylaws is a good start but needs some wordsmithing and
pruning.  If you have some comfort with legalese, please take a stab at
it and discuss changes, either here or on IRC.

-andy