spf-discuss
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Re: The Role of the SPF council

2004-12-14 13:24:44
On Friday 10 December 2004 03:00 pm, william(at)elan.net wrote:
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 are a contract among the members of the organization. It is the 
mechanism whereby the voice of the organization is heard and their will 
known. You talk about where the council has the support or lack thereof of 
the community. How can the council know for sure unless that has been 
acknowledged and written down?

If we had bylaws that stated the purpose of the council, they would have the 
obvious and blatant support of the community. They could say things like 
"The community says" and such. Right now, they have no authority and no 
mandate from the community. They are a group of very intelligent and nice 
people, but they have no authority.

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


You're misunderstanding the point of the bylaws. Yes, they help in a crisis, 
but they also give authority to the right people for day-to-day operations. 
Let's say I want to donate $5 to the SPF community. Who do I give it to? 
How is it recorded? What will it be used for? Who will authorize its 
spending? What if a reporter comes to Meng asking for a statement on behalf 
of the community? Can he give it? Does he represent the community or not? 
These are all basic questions we cannot answer at this time.

If you're curious as to how a family works, most cultures acknowledge either 
an equal partnership between spouses (in Western societies), or they give 
absolute authority to the husband (Middle East and Asian societies). This 
is done by default and there is no need to formalize it as it is 
understood. We have no such understanding here, except the culture and 
customs that we inherited (Robert's Rules documenting them.)


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.

I don't believe this is true. A lot of so-called organizations don't have 
any rules except whatever they think is fair. (They shouldn't call 
themselves organizations because they never organized!) The end result is 
always confusion.

I am going to write and present a proposal here soon, barring unforeseen 
circumstances. It should clear up a lot of the confusion.

-- 
Jonathan M. Gardner