On Thu, 27 Sep 2007, Michael K. Smith - Adhost wrote:
Proposal 2:
Shall program committee members be permitted to skip rating
presentation proposals that do not fall into their areas of
expertise?
Wording:
Change the third paragraph of Section 8.3.2 as follows:
Old version: "Each member of the Program Committee must review all
presentations submitted for each meeting. The Chair may excuse a
member from one meeting's review cycle due to extenuating
circumstances, but if a member misses two meetings in a row, he or
she may be removed from the committee."
New version: "Each member of the Program Committee must review all
presentations submitted for each meeting and rate those
presentations which fall into their areas of expertise. The Chair
may excuse a member from one meeting's review cycle due to
extenuating circumstances, but if a member misses two meetings in a
row, he or she may be removed from the committee."
It seems like you're talking about two totally different things here,
punitive actions for missing meetings and requirements for PC Members to
audit presentations. Unless it's really worth defining both separately
I would scratch the whole thing. If you need to define punitive
actions, why not just say "a simple majority may take action to remove a
Program Committee Member for cause." The first sentence, taken alone,
could be listed as a portion of PC Members assigned duties (if such a
thing exists).
Since we're amending an existing document, this would be two separate
changes.
The one being proposed here is supposed to reduce the requirements for
Program Committee members (although, rereading it, I see that in the old
version there wasn't actually a requirement for members to "rate"
anything, as opposed to just "reviewing" things, so maybe it accidentally
adds more requirements instead). It does that by adding a few words to an
existing paragraph.
The other thing being debated is the language about the procedure for
removing Program Committee members. That's in the same paragraph, because
it's how we wrote it a few years ago, but it's not really related to this
proposal. If it needs to change, that should probably be done via a
separate amendment.
I don't have strong feelings on the merits of either of the proposed
amendments (and as long as I'm drafting charter changes at the request of
an elected committee I'm not part of, any strong feelings I might develop
should probably be kept out of this). I can talk to some degree about the
initial intent of the charter, with the caveat that there were lots of
people involved and we may not have all intended the same thing.
My intent, which was fairly influential since I was the last one to do
major editing on the document, was to to make sure the Steering Committee
selection process was very clear, to give them some power, and beyond that
to give them a pretty free hand. They were going to be elected, while
those of us working on the charter were self-appointed, so any decisions
they made were going to have a lot more legitimacy than the decisions we
were making. Others had some very strong concerns about the operation of
the Program Committee, so that got specified in probably more detail than
I would have preferred.
So, in that vein, it seems to me that that the vagueness in the Program
Committee member-removal text is ok. The Steering Committee is in charge,
and if there's a desire to remove a member of the Program Committee, the
procedure ought to be whatever they say it is.
But, that said, we also intended the charter to be changeable if people
felt the need to do so. That's what the Amendments procedure is there
for.
-Steve
