Suggested member election change.

[Allen Rout]

Vouch, V: to take responsibility for, to express confidence in, to witness [1]


Liza suggested an additional/different way to add members to the
rolls. We have had problems for years with the simple bureaucratic
plumbing of the monthly election, so her critique is well taken.

In our bylaws [2], we get new members by getting to know them and
getting a simple majority of voting members to give a thumbs-up. The
point of this is to reinforce the hackerspace as -community-, not as
(for example) tool-having health club or whatnot. She suggested we
might admit new members based on the expressed trust of three voting
members. I thought that the term 'Vouch' was exactly appropriate
here. If we're going to admit based on a smaller set of peoples'
opinions, then we should require that those opinions be quite a bit
stronger than just "Yeah, sounds good", which is fine for an election
IMO.

Here's my suggested phrasing for a paragraph to enact Liza's suggestion:


Any qualified person may become a member upon:

- payment of appropriate dues, and

- one of
+ a simple majority of a quorum of voting members.
+ the identification of three voting members who will vouch for the person.

[ with a footnote recounting the definition of vouch ]


The meaning of vouch is not just "Yeah, they've got a neat project",
but also "I'm so confident they're trustworthy, I'll take some
responsibility for it if I'm wrong".


I hope to submit a suggested change (pull request, natch) to the
organizing documents soon.


Any thoughts?


- Allen S. Rout


[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vouch

[2] http://wiki.skillhouse.org/index.php/Organizing_Documents

[Liza Kholodkova]

I agree.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Gainesville Hackerspace" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to gainesville-hackerspace+unsub...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send an email to gainesville-hackerspace@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gainesville-hackerspace/CANfnVWrDqn2vZqCCQQdV5QbG_E70P-kNZ3Ds4mfkMgXNRu4j-w%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

Sincerely,

Liza Kholodkova

Founder of Botsy BeDrawn

Aerospace and Mechanical Engineer