IrelandOFFLine Rough Draft Constitution - Serious Input Needed

daveirl

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daveirl

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daveirl

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daveirl

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daveirl

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daveirl

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sceptre

Originally posted by daveirl
Comment:-Do we need more levels of management. I'd like to see some sort of regional committees but I don't know if that is going to work. I could see problems if there was representation is some areas but not in others. But what do you all think?

Easily solved I think - just pop in a little section along the lines of
"Provision may be made for the establishment of representative sub-committees on a regional basis, elected by the membership of that region"

(maybe they should be standing committees or something - I don't know the difference and TBH I've never really cared)

The advantage of doing the above is that you can do it if you/people want, don't have to do it if there's no interest or advantage. It also has the capacity to keep it as formal or informal as you like. I hate these constitutions where they include a whole load of nitty-gritty procedural matters which could be better dealt with elsewhere (see a number of recent amendments to our national constitution for one). Keep it simple, keep it aspirational, include basic rules for elections and so on. That's all you need (and all you've included too, nice one)

Kudos for not including a stupid opener like "there shall be an organisation known as..." BTW - looks silly, does nothing.

daveirl

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seamus

Sterling work already Dave. Well done.

Article 2 – Membership
The ordinary membership of IOFFL shall consist of …..

This is tough to define, seeing as a lot is done electronically. As you say, maybe if there was a register of names, such that "shall consist of all those whos names appear on the member's register."

Article 6
(A) A General meeting may be convened if requested by
i) The Committee
ii) The written request of no less than 75 members delivered to the committee.
In All cases the request shall state the purpose for which the general meeting is being convened

(B) The Committee chair shall give no less than 10 days notice of a General
Meeting. Electronic communication is deemed sufficient

(C) The meeting must be held within 14 days of the request.

I'd change those figures. IOFFL membership isn't massive, maybe a petition of around 40 members....

(B) The Committee chair shall give no less then 14 days notice (or maybe 10 working days notice) of a General Meeting. - A lot of past meetings were given more than 10 days notice and there were still complaints of lack of notice.

(C) The meeting must be held within 21 days of the request. - Again, to avoid scathing attacks

(D) The announcement of a GM must be made using both the membership mailing list and the electronic bulletin board at boards.ie, and must be made expressly. - I.e. Send out an email to the list with the announcement, and not contained within the newsletter, etc. Again to protect against 'lack of notice' complaints.

(I'm not very good at this type of thing )

Article 8 - Elections
I'd like to see provisions in here for the election of members to the committee.
Provisions for motions of no confidence to see the removal of committee members.

A. The Election of Committee Members and Chairperson shall take place every x years/months at a General Meeting of Members.

B. Every member of IOFFL, present at the General Meeting, shall be entitled to a single vote.

C. Members must register themselves as candidates for election as a committee member and/or as chairperson.

D. Every member of IOFFL is eligible to register as a candidate for election.

E. The outgoing Chairperson may become a member of the incoming committee, without election, at his/her discretion, except in such cases where the Chairperson has been removed as result of a motion of no confidence by the members.

F. An election may not take place if less than 20 members are present at a General Meeting. The committee and/or chairperson may continue to serve, or an interim committee and/or chairperson may be appointed from the members present at the General Meeting, until such time as another General Meeting can be held.

Motion of no confidence

G. The membership or a majority of the committee may call a General Meeting to discuss no confidence in the committee and/or chairperson, as allowed for in 6(a).

H. The vote of no confidence shall be by show of hands.

I. In the event of removal of the chairperson by no confidence, a new chairperson may be elected from the membership, or an interim chairperson appointed by the committee until such time as a new chairperson can be elected by the membership.

J. In the event of removal of the committee by no confidence, a new committee must be elected from the membership at the same General Meeting.




Sorry I kinda got on a bit of a roll

maxheadroom

Originally posted by daveirl
Comment:-I just picked the number of 75 members off the top of my head. Revise as is thought appropriate.

Might be better with a set percentage of ordinary members? There's no point in having 75 if we only end up with, e.g. 80 actual members (picking a number out of the air again). What's the normal quorum at an EGM / SGM of an organisation?

dahamsta

Good stuff Dave. I don't have a lot of time right now, so my apologies if I'm repeating...

membership

I don't believe membership of the mailing list is enough. Some people may be subscribed to the mailing list purely for informational purposes (journalists, etc), and it's never been made clear. One option is to ask people to register for Geeklog on irelandoffline.org - although the same problem applies as with the mailing list - or a couple scripts could be written for it. I'd be happy to donate the scripts, I believe I have some preparatory work done on them already.

aim

These need to be debated once more before they're written into the constitution.

regional committees

There's no need to overthink it. Regional subcommittees are subcommittees, so the original clause covers it.

(meetings) The written request of no less than 75 members delivered to the committee.

Define written. Will email suffice?

The Committee chair shall give no less than 10 days notice of a General Meeting.

IrelandOffline is a national organisation. 14 days.

Meeting periodocity

Full committee meetings should be held quarterly.

elections

I'll come back to this.

daveirl

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yellum

This is good, real good. Good constructive replies too.

maxheadroom

maxheadroom suggests that we use a fixed percentage of the membership. This would be ideal except people wouldn't know in advance what number they would have to reach.

Shouldn't be a problem if there is an accurate, up to date member's register.


On that point, is there going to be some kind of annual renual process? Even something as simple as "if you want to remain on the members register, please reply to this email or go to this URL"

yellum

make this a sticky , mods ? pwlease ?

dahamsta

Just on the matter of voting, as some of you will have seen I've been talking about another project that will require registration, and I'd like to tie the two of these together; and several other projects as it happens, which aren't strictly relevant so I won't cover them at this time.

Ultimately, when it comes to voting on any matter or in any format, the primary issue is the matter of identity assurance. I've written a short paper on this that I'll be publishing to forums like IIU and ILUG shortly for comment, but if you have an opinion or an idea on the matter, please feel free to post it here.

Hopefully Dustaz or sceptre will help me out by splitting and merging relevant posts later.

Thanks,
adam

BoneCollector

how about defining membership in the following manner.

Membership shall be defined as those who register on the active membership list for the purpose of inclusion in applying themselves to the duties and responsibilities accorded to the membership of Ireland offline. The duties and responsibilities, code of conduct are documented in the Membership manual available from our website at www.irelandoffline.org/filename.doc . The active membership list shall consist for publication to contain first name, last name, Alias (as used on boards.ie or other) and any authorised contact details, Which shall be made available to any member upon request, from Ireland offline committee.

SkepticOne

Keep those ideas rolling in.

santalives

I know this is a bastard of idea to implement but due to the nature of electronic voting and swaying of opinions (as seen by the world favourite song on BBC), that a written letter to be sent to each member that they must reply to. So it easy to view how many people there actually are and to verify their actual existence. It is all too easy for phantom member to sway what appears to be the overall opinion of an in a manner that is against the true opinion of the true members.

Also in relation to motions of no confidence you may want to put in a % of members that have to be present for a motion of no confidence to be passed.

Also it may be wise to include "if necessary vote by proxy or mail voting may be used" as a lot of member may be unable to, or to young to travel to where ever the AGM is, as people from all over Ireland have to be represented

daveirl

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oscarBravo

Originally posted by seamus
B. Every member of IOFFL, present at the General Meeting, shall be entitled to a single vote.[/B]

Given that IrelandOffline sets so much store by being a "cyberspace" community, it seems harsh that only those able to physically attend the AGM have the right to vote on issues.

How about being allowed to appoint a proxy to vote on your behalf?

Sovjohn

I 'm a very lucky man indeed.

First, I find out about IOFFL. Then, I most gladly find out that Irish people DONT speak Irish (um, ok, the story of whether they should or not, and the Catholics, and the...whats the other name, Protestants? conflicting isnt any of my business..)
/
Then, I find out that not only most of people here seem eager to help (I suppose I must send some Thank You cards to David Long), but also you are actually talking about the Draft Constitution atm, which will help me a lot to better plan and understand the Greek equivalents..

So, let's see:

a) Requesting permission to offer some suggestions to your draft. I m not a member of IOFFL, but I m surely interested in it doing very well
b) Good work so far people, in this thread and generally
c) Did I black advertise the site by mentioning the first rough coming soon page is now up? Try the URL

Kind regards,
John M.
Founder of GOFFL
http://greeceoffline.org ( .net and .com also apply)

bk

Originally posted by Sovjohn

So, let's see:

a) Requesting permission to offer some suggestions to your draft. I m not a member of IOFFL, but I m surely interested in it doing very well

I'm sorry that no one replied to your post, it seems this thread has gotten a little quiet, while I can't speak for anyone else in IOFFL but myself, I'm sure everyone in IOFFL would be happy to hear any suggestions or feedback about this draft or any other matter involving IOFFL.

I believe the goals of IOFFL and Greece Offline are the same and that we should help each other in any way possible. There is strength in numbers after all.

BTW I just checked out your site, very nice, I'm sorry I can't speak Greek.

Sovjohn

Thanks for replying, bk.

Originally posted by bk
I believe the goals of IOFFL and Greece Offline are the same and that we should help each other in any way possible. There is strength in numbers after all.

Yeah well...I believe the same for both IOFFL and GOFFL (heh, we got our own nickname:D)

Considering the site...All that you can see atm is Argoulis (that's our lil turtle on the logo...although the greek internet is SO awful that they'd deserve something slower than a snail...dunno anything acknowledgeable though)

I had faced some severe PC probs that pushed the site development back per one week...In any case, by end of Feb the site will be bilingual (Greek and English), for all you English friends, as well as Greek people from abroad (whose Greek is..rusty at best) to be able to participate.
The only drawback of the two languages is that the English one will get the articles with one+ week delay compared to the Greek one, and that the English one will have weekly summaries of news instead of daily items..
All the rest will remain the same.

I will post in here once the English version of GOFFL is up, for you to check it out:)

The site content is based (not completely, but some deal of it) on IOFFL, EircomTribunal.com and http://www.unmetered.org.uk (CUT)
..You ll notice some changes in the english edition:)

Ta ta,
John Matzavrakos
Greeceoffline.org Founder and Administrator

bk

Originally posted by Sovjohn
I will post in here once the English version of GOFFL is up, for you to check it out:)

Looking forward to it :cool: