[Spi-private] Publically viewable resolutions and increasing the visibility of board activity

[Jimmy Kaplowitz]

On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 04:22:56AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
> I suggest changing this to resolutions must be submitted 24 hours in
> advance of the publication of the meeting announcement which must
> occur at least 4 days before the meeting and include the full text of
> the resolutions to be decided at the meeting as well as the schedule
> of the meeting.[1]
> 
> Resolutions which do not meet the deadline would be automatically
> defered to the next meeting. [I suppose exceptions could be made for
> emergency resolutions, but those should be few and far between, and
> should probably require a non-regularly scheduled meeting to be called
> anyway.]

This sounds good to me, though I'd suggest a few further changes. Your
wording does not enable a resolution proposer to know his own deadline
for submitting the resolution, since the meeting could be announced less
than 24 hours after its submission with no advance warning. Also,
including the full text of the agenda schedule and resolutions is
reasonable, but so is providing a URL to the same info on the website.
Resolutions that are to be discussed but not decided on should also be
mentioned. Finally, I don't see a reason that emergency resolutions
should be restricted to irregularly scheduled meetings, but I do feel
they shouldn't be used for the sole purpose of circumventing this
policy.

I'd suggest this wording:

"Resolutions must be submitted at least 6 days (144 hours) before the
meeting at which they are to be voted on. A meeting announcement
containing the location, date, and time of each meeting shall be emailed
to the spi-announce mailing list at least 4 days (96 hours) before the
meeting. All meeting announcements will contain the full text of
resolutions to be addressed at the meeting and the schedule for the
meeting, or will provide a publically accessible URL on the SPI website
where this information can be obtained.

Resolutions submitted less than 6 days (144 hours) before the meeting at
which they are intended to be voted on will have the vote deferred to
the following meeting. The board may make exceptions to this in cases
where it is essential to make a decision sooner than this policy would
otherwise allow, but exceptions shall be avoided wherever possible in
the interest of allowing sufficient time for SPI directors and members
to notice and discuss the late resolutions before voting on them. At a
meeting where this policy causes the deferral of the vote on a
resolution, the resolution may still be discussed at the earlier meeting
at the board's discretion."

I specified 6 days instead of 5 days above in order to give the
secretary more than a 24-hour window to prepare the announcement, in
case he has a busy day at an inconvenient time. I like having several
days' notice for the meeting, which allows people to discuss on email
and arrange their attendance at the meeting if they should want to.

- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy at spi-inc.org