[wplug-plan] Quorum Conundrum

[David Ostroske]

Gotta correct something there, Patrick...

On 7/24/06, Patrick Wagstrom <pwagstro at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
[...]
> With regards to quorum, please show up to the meeting on August 5th, and
> we'll try to cover this in detail.  Our quorum is already remarkably
> low.  Really, it is.  From Section 5.4 of the bylaws[1]:
[down...]
> [1] http://www.wplug.org/pages/bylaws#5.4
[up...]
>
> The quorum for membership meetings shall be the lesser of:
>
>      1. the sum of the prescribed size of the Board plus the square root
>         of the total membership, voting and non-voting; or
>      2. the majority of the total voting membership.
>
> Right now I believe we have about 80 members, which puts our quorum at
> 14 people.  Yes, 14 people.  We can't get 14 people.  I'd be really
> leery of dropping this requirement any further.  As far as online

Actually, since we have to use the _prescribed_ size of the Board in
the calculation (which is 7, not 5), our current quorum for membership
meetings is 16 people, not 14. Personally, I'm not at all leery about
lowering that requirement!

> voting, it's a good idea, but misses the exchange of ideas that you get
> from real discussion.  It's slow, prone to get lost, and often comes out
> as being unbalanced.  I'm not in favor of it, but you're welcome to
> bring it up at the meeting next Saturday.  This is something we've been
> hammering out for a while and we are certainly open to ideas from other
> folks.

If there's enough enthusiasm for online membership meetings, then we
could make a bylaws change to make it happen. We'd probably use the
mechanisms that we had established for the Board and committees, but
adapt them (severely) for membership meeting purposes.

Relevant docs:
http://wplug.org/pages/bylaws#8.4 (Sec. 8.4, Virtual Meetings)
http://wplug.org/pipermail/wplug-board/2005-October/000510.html (An
example: IRC Virtual Meetings Special Rule of Order)

I'm not endorsing the idea of virtual membership meetings, BTW. I'm
just showing what could be done. The actual practice could be more
difficult to make work than live meetings.

-- 
David Ostroske <eksortso at gmail.com>