Regular Member Meeting 2016 07 12

Time and Location

Date

Called to order at 7:46 pm by Enrique

Members present: Evan W., Evan M., Tom, Nancy, Ken, Bobby, Enrique

Members remote: Kevin, Don

Others present:

Quorum

Quorum met?

New Business

Vote to approve standing rules as written.

Vote to remove redundant, superseded language about quorum in standing rules.

Vote to retroactively approve of any past actions taken in line with these new standing rules.

Vote to approve any and all votes which may have been taken under an improperly defined quorum.

Director Reports

Treasurer's Report

I've been out of town, so this may be a short report. Also because I left town, we paid July rent early, and I forgot to bill a handful of members for June, so the June balance looks lower than usual but it's temporary. Sorry to anyone who gets billed twice in July to make up for it.

Secretary's Report

I have mentioned in previous meetings that I reviewed the standing rules.

To see my rationale, you may view the history of this page here:

http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php?title=Standing_Rules&action=history

particularly this first edit,

"09:11, 4 March 2016‎ Tom (Talk | contribs)‎ . . (32 bytes) (+32)‎ . . (Tom moved page Standing Rules to Old Standing Rules: These are ancient)"

These are the old standing rules:

http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Old_Standing_Rules

Basically useless.

The current page was kept under "Proposed standing rules". In my review, I realized that most of these standing rules had been approved. So I just moved it from "Proposed standing rules" to "Standing Rules", provided annotations and links to relevant meeting minutes, and moved the old standing rules as above.

I trust this doesn't require much explanation.

I also noticed some sensible seeming rules that did not seem to have been voted on, but I think are good rules that we should have.

Article IV, http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Standing_Rules#Article_IV:_Meetings

Sections 4-6 did not seem to have been voted on.

Article V, http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Standing_Rules#Article_V:_Materiel

Looks like the whole section hasn't been voted on.

I think we should vote to approve these two sections and also vote to declare them as retroactively applicable, i.e., that we understand them to be good policy and we regard any actions taken in the past, that were in line with these rules, as legitimate.

This section on quorum is redundant, and should be removed:

http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Standing_Rules#Quorum

Quorum is defined in our bylaws.

We should vote to remove it, but I also believe we should vote to retroactively consider any votes taken under a quorum met under this rule as legitimate.

Or we could decide that's not a good idea, but I will be unable and largely unwilling to go back and try to figure out which votes we should nullify, because that's stupid.

These are the specifics of my recommendations.

In general, it seems like the standing rules are poorly understood by our membership. Maybe some people knew what they were, but as the documentation was confusing and inconsistent, I think it's only due to the institutional memory of active members of the club and oral tradition. This is problematic for many reasons, some of which should be quite obvious. I invited the membership to read the standing rules and highlight anything they thought looked drastically incorrect or inconsistent that I may have missed. I realize that people may have ideas for improvements they might like to see voted on; members are always welcome to work with each other and bring changes to our standing rules through the e-mail list, or any other venue, to be voted on in our monthly meetings.

Project Awesome Reports

Project Electron Microscope (SEM)

Need to verify last distribution can afford vacuum sensor.

Adjournment

Adjourned by at xxx by xxx