Hi Mark, (I think your clock might be in the wrong timezone?)
On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 07:57 -0400, mark wrote: > I think you are aiming for an "ideal" solution. From my (admittedly > limited) experience of AFFS there is little possibility of a broad > consensus amongst members on a large number of issues surrounding free > software. That's possibly true - AFFS is quite a broad church in many ways. I think, though, that actually makes it more important that AGM is treated how it should be - a decision making body, but not more than that. You need to have very broad agreement before getting to AGM. As an example: > There is no reason in my view why AFFS members who are unable to attend > meetings should not be able to vote on certain issues, and even for > election of committee members. This could be done either online or by > post. There is no reason why this shouldn't be the case; but at the moment it's not because our constitution doesn't allow it (postal voting). I tried at the last AGM to change our constitution and thought I had fairly broad agreement before I got to AGM. When I got to AGM, new problems with the changes were put forward and at that point you cannot really alter your proposal. So, we've been left another year+ with the problem still in place. (As an aside, committee did agree to put forward a single small change to remove this restriction at the next AGM; this will hopefully be completely uncontroversial ;) For some changes to the way AFFS works, we must have nothing less than almost complete consensus. Other changes won't need as broad agreement - only constitutional amendments need a 2/3rds majority, and I don't think we need that kind of proposal for a lot of the changes that are being talked about here - but getting some kind of consensus is essential. That has to happen before AGM; there isn't enough time at AGM to discuss things fully and properly. Change can definitely take place outside of AGM, of course, but I suspect that any committee wouldn't be happy with doing something quite radical without an AGM discussion. > If the committee members can get to the point where somebody stands up > in an AFFS meeting, fully cognisant of the AFFS minuting and > procedures, and says something like "I'd like to say something off the > record...." and then proceeds to outline a piece of hearsay, or their > knowledge on a controversial topic, then you will know that the system > is working as it reasonably should. Well, it does pretty much work like this already. The general issue over minutes is one particular to the committee (I don't think anyone has a problem with our AGM minutes); what has held them up is disagreement over format and accuracy. I think we've solved the former completely, and are putting together a minute book. The latter may take more work. Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
