On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Greg Connor wrote:
It is an excellent starting point. I don't think the council should
limit itself to these activities, and I don't think others not on the
council should avoid these activities. They are definitely important.
There is a difference between council taking some activity as
organizational unit and individual members of the council doing it
on their own. I'm against that council take on the activities
that do not seem to have support of SPF Community as a whole
(i.e. where SPF Community feels it needs to delegate those tasks
to the council).
Individual members of the council are of course free to bring up new
issues to spf-discuss as this happended before so that spf community
would not be bypassed by them just because they are is on the council.
The "bylaws" or other documented control structure is a valid way of
bringing order to an organization. This is important in a formal
setting such as a company, government organization, anything that
handles money, or the like. It's probably overkill for other types of
organizations (such as interest groups or families).
"bylaws" seems like an additional overhead until you get to the point
of some crisis (or serious disagreement in the group) and then you
understand that if you documented procedures were avalable the crisis
would like have been avoided
One theory of organization is that the "formal" systems and practices are
necessary when trust is not sufficient to hold the organization together. I
would much rather have a strong mission statement than strong bylaws any day.
Mission-statement is a charter, while bylaws are work group procedures and
both are important for well functioning group. Many groups bypass exact
following of bylaws when things are done informarly but have them available
and use them when there are "frictions" within the group.
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net