Monthly General Meeting, January 2025
Proposition and motions
Board composition & restructuring
It was discussed whether the projects & community team needed a person to act as a representative to the board, or whether that team can drop to the same non-specialised status as our trust & safety team.
This quickly detoured into discussing instead whether team representatives needed to be board members at all, or whether the entire board membership can be made up of people who are not necessarily the representative of a team, but rather elected by the whole staff membership rather than by the membership of their team.
It was noted that the projects & community team is not particularly busy right now, and so may not even need a representative. It was also noted that the only team whose membership has meaningful consequences is the operations team.
The general consensus was therefore that severing the board composition from the specialised teams was a good idea, with the exception of the operations team. The idea was put to the all-staff e-mail list, along with a proposed bylaws amendment. This will be discussed and voted on during a future MGM.
AGM election process
It was discussed whether the current process of holding an asynchronous election whose results are ratified by the AGM is acceptable, and whether it should be codified into the bylaws.
The general consensus was that it is acceptable, and should not be codified into the bylaws. The point was raised that if we do this, and then that specific process becomes unusable (e.g. the CIVS website is unavailable), we would have to amend the bylaws again before we could hold an election.
Bylaws section numbering
It was discussed whether we should number the sections in our bylaws, in order to make it easier to refer to them. This was quickly approved.
Other questions
Staff privileges cleanup
It was discussed whether we should drop the network privileges of staff who have been inactive. It was noted that no-one could pinpoint the last time we had done so, and that there was no formal process to emerge from that.
It was decided that 3 months of not being opered up was a good cutoff point for having oper privileges withheld. It was also decided that the resignation of an organisation member should be codified as requiring an official e-mail, as well as changing to or from quorum membership status.
The idea behind quorum membership is that it should be impossible for the board to schedule an MGM that the majority of staff will not be able to attend, and then ratify actions that the membership would disagree with. For this reason, any MGM requires at least half of the organisation’s quorum members to be present. However, at the moment, changing one’s quorum membership status is an informal process, somewhat defeating the point; if the whole of the organisation’s membership cannot see when the status of someone’s quorum membership has been removed, it is easier for the board to misbehave.
Both of these decisions (inactivity resulting in removal of privileges, and formal changes of membership status) will be summarised and put to the all- staff e-mail list for further discussion.