Bylwas Revision: COMMITTEES

[Christoph Lameter]

I would rather favor having individuals making those decisions. Committees
are useful if you want to slow down any possible dangerous decisions or 
if power needs to be controller but Committees are not useful for day to
day operations. I would like this to be as non-political as possible. So
far we have had a pretty informal structure and it worked mostly.

Could we make all of this as simple as possible? This looks more and more
to me as if we are building a big administrative apparatus.

I would like to see a list of jobs for individuals within SPI and then a
responsibility to the BOD.

On Tue, 30 Mar 1999, Nils Lohner wrote:

> 
> 
> This is the beginning of the discussion for the committee article of the 
> bylaws.  Here are some basic principles which I feel should apply to the 
> committees.
> 
> - they should take care of most of the day to day operation of SPI
>   [this takes the workload off the BOD]
> - their rights and responsibilities should be completely described in 
> their charter
> - they should be governed by the board of directors
>   [what does this really mean?  I'm not sure yet... but that's who they 
> should 'report' to]
> - the BOD should be able to issue charters (i.e. create committees)
>   [I'm thinking that if the consensus is that a new committee is needed, 
> the BOD can issue a charter.  The membership should definitely have some 
> input here though. how? By helping write the charter.]
> 
> 
> QUESTIONS:
> ----------
> - how are leaders appointed?  I'd say by the BOD, possibly the membership.
> - how are members appointed?  BOD?  Leader?  Membership?
> - should non-contributing members be able to serve on committees? 
> [incidentally, that would automatically make them contributing 
> members...!!]
> - what do we do if a committee is no longer necessary?  disband it.  How? 
> BOD vote?
> 
> 
> I'm sure there are other issues here that I'm not addressing... please 
> bring them up if you think of them!  As I think you can see, this 
> discussion is one step closer to the voting discussion, as this will bring 
> up a lot of issues regarding who controls what and why. I think that when 
> we're done with this discussion, the voting discussion will be a lot 
> easier because the political infrastructure will be in place.
> 
> Enjoy...
> Nils.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Nils Lohner                         Software in the Public Interest, Inc.
> E-Mail: lohner at spi-inc.org          PO Box 1326 
> Board Of Directors <board at spi-inc.org> Boston, Ma. 02117 USA
> 
> 
> 
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