[wplug-plan] Quorum Conundrum

[Bill Moran]

In response to "David Ostroske" <eksortso at gmail.com>:

> > 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.

We need to keep focused.  If we flail about with 1000 solutions at one
time, we'll never really know what's going on.  I think we should
approach this with good diagnostic technique, and that involves replacing
one piece of the puzzle at a time, then evaluating that change to
determine whether it was the correct change or not.  If we change the
dues and the bylaws and suddenly have electronic meetings all at once ...
well, I for one won't feel as if we know whether we did anything right
or not.  Creating new tiers of membership adds new complexity to the
organization, and having online meetings presents its own challenges
as well.  Neither of these are things that should be jumped into without
planning.

I'm not saying we shouldn't approach these topics, I'm suggesting we
prioritize.  We're still having trouble getting committees effectively
doing anything, that should be addressed directly.  Once they're actually
doing things, we can focus on ways to make their jobs easier.  We seemed
to agree that we have too many inactive members.  I don't see online
meetings as solving that issue in any way: if they're inactive, why would
they show up at online meetings either?

I'm still firmly in the camp that we got over-enthusiastic about new
members and were giving the memberships away for free to people who didn't
even really want them.  This is an understandable mistake, and now that
we understand it, let's fix it directly, not dance around other issues.

Again, that's not to say that these topics couldn't be brought up at the
meeting and/or discussed here.  I'm just suggesting that we keep the
things that are orthogonal separated and not muddied.

-- 
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.