On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 18:08 +0100, Graham Seaman wrote: > >It didn't happen at a meeting, so no, I'm afraid it hasn't been minuted. > >But it did achieve the required majority: when, I don't know, I thought > >it was before Mark left. I might be wrong about that. > > Since these emails are presumably being archived for anyone to examine > in the future, might it be a good idea for someone to explain for > posterity and those of us not on the committee what's going on?
Sure. Basically, the committee meets a few times a year - recently both on the phone and at a venue in London - but decision making happens outside those, as and when the need arises. They're usually "smaller" decisions - more about stuff happening day to day. The process of how the committee runs the organisation on a day-to-day basis isn't formalised in the constitution, so we adopt practises which seem to make sense at the time. Basically, someone puts a proposal forward and we vote on whether or not it should carry. (Re-ordered:) > How can you have the 'required majority' outside a meeting, whether > minuted or not? Because our meetings are fairly infrequent, we take decisions outside of them. If we didn't make decisions between meetings, a lot of the topics we need to decide stuff about (who to send to X event, whether or not we should support a specific project, etc.) would be out of date. > Lack of time and volunteers? The organisation has been taken over by a > cabal? Ambitious constititution without the means to implement it? > Political disagreement? All of the above? Oh gosh, probably all of the above to some degree. There certainly are political and constitutional differences; the more important ones have been discussed on here before but there are smaller problems (which mostly don't cause disagreement, I think). I think I've already stated some of the areas I think are problematic, and there are a few no-brainer changes to the constitution that I think all would like to see adopted (or, at least, have been completely uncontroversial in my experience). There is definitely a lack of time and volunteers: Chris stepped forward to help out with the AGM planning (which we will need to start getting on with very soon), and we could definitely use more people (especially "on the ground" - we try to attend events when and where we can, but probably don't go to enough, and aren't able to do other tasks like visiting M[E]Ps, etc.). There isn't a *need* for any of this to be done at committee level - in fact, a while ago, we setup the AFFS-Project mailing list to act as an organisational medium without overloading this list with unwelcome traffic. It hasn't really worked though, I'm not sure why (I mean; obviously just adding a new mailing list doesn't do squat, but we did think there were people out there for whom it would be useful). I suspect the main reason is that "doing AFFS work" isn't even nearly as interesting as "doing [X task I want to do] under the AFFS umbrella", even though the two are hopefully the same thing. There are certainly many other reasons, though. We've also occasionally asked for people to help with various specific projects in our mailing list. That has been pretty helpful in terms of information gathering, I think, but again not with the "bodies on the ground" aspect. It probably is cabal-ised to some degree, but I would say that would be fairly easily remedied by other people stepping up to the plate: I know of at least one person who has already said they want to be considered for co-option, and others who would be interested. Committee was designed to be quite large: we can have up to eleven people involved, but we haven't really come close to that watermark ever. AFFS has done a number of things well; I think we're a good source of information (particularly in person), we have good links with other friendly organisations (FSFE, FFII, Schoolforge-UK, etc.) and with journalists. Anything that has required people to be there has been difficult. We haven't engaged with people on a local level particularly well (e.g., we were recently speaking at a "Liquid Culture" talk in London; but there are similar initiatives and projects all over the UK), similarly super-national stuff (e.g., lobbying in Brussels - we have members going, but no AFFS representation). We rarely present outside the UK (e.g., LinuxTag). So, I think we're better at national level than below or above (which again speaks to the 'bodies' thing). Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
