Custom Constitutions

[Russ Garrett]

I'm in a situation where I'd like to make some significant changes to
an OCO constitution. Although it would be possible to write this up as
additional rules and adopt these with a vote, it somewhat offends my
sense of neatness (and in this particular case, the resulting rules
and the OCO-generated constitution may actually be mutually
incompatible).

Although it would be amazing if the entire constitution was easily
mutable through the OCO interface, I think the minimum viable way of
doing this for my case would be to make it possible to adopt a link to
an external document as a constitution. The person responsible for
maintaining the external document is then responsible for applying any
changes voted on using OCO (in compliance with the constitution).

An alternative would be to host the constitution as a free-text
document within OCO, but it would be then necessary to either:

a) Appoint a member of the organisation as a "secretary" with full
ability to modify the constitution in response to votes, or
b) Be able to attach alterations to the constitution to existing votes
(e.g. changing voting periods).

...which is a lot more work.

Thoughts?

--
Russ Garrett
ru...@garrett.co.uk

[Chris Mear]

> On 19 Apr 2014, at 13:02, Russ Garrett <ru...@garrett.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I'm in a situation where I'd like to make some significant changes to
> an OCO constitution. Although it would be possible to write this up as
> additional rules and adopt these with a vote, it somewhat offends my
> sense of neatness

Agreed! We have been experimenting with some solutions for freeform modification of the constitution in-place, since it's a pretty common request, but no finished features yet.

> (and in this particular case, the resulting rules
> and the OCO-generated constitution may actually be mutually
> incompatible).

This is the tricky bit. If the new/amended rules affect how the machinery of electronic voting/membership/etc. work, then we need to make sure the app will still behave appropriately. Or at least warn people that they need to work around this themselves. It may involve opening up some of the internal settings (like voting period, voting systems) to manual editing, so that members can keep their custom constitution and the mechanics of the app 'in sync'. This is why the current system only allows a small number of tightly controlled editing points in the constitution.

> Although it would be amazing if the entire constitution was easily
> mutable through the OCO interface, I think the minimum viable way of
> doing this for my case would be to make it possible to adopt a link to
> an external document as a constitution. The person responsible for
> maintaining the external document is then responsible for applying any
> changes voted on using OCO (in compliance with the constitution).

Yes, this seems like a good way to get this feature started.

As you say, it then becomes the responsibility of the members to ensure they're not using the app in a way that is inconsistent with their constitution (whereas with the current system we are able to automate this pretty much). So we would have to wrap this in a way that makes it very clear to the members that they have to think about this additional responsibility if they want to go down this route.

But, with that proviso, I'd be happy to look at adding this to the app.

> An alternative would be to host the constitution as a free-text
> document within OCO, but it would be then necessary to either:
>
> a) Appoint a member of the organisation as a "secretary" with full
> ability to modify the constitution in response to votes, or
> b) Be able to attach alterations to the constitution to existing votes
> (e.g. changing voting periods).
>
> ...which is a lot more work.

We do now have some of the building blocks for this, but a release is still some way off. It would be good to base this feature on some real-world experience of how people need to amend the constitution, so what you're doing with this organisation could be a useful test case when we get to that.

Can you give us some idea of the amendments and additions you need to make? Is it anything that would affect the way voting and membership currently happen within the app?

Thanks,
Chris

[Russ Garrett]

(Just for the avoidance of doubt, the organisation I'm talking about
in this case isn't London Hackspace, which already doesn't have an
OCO-managed constitution. It's a standard OCO association.)

On 19 April 2014 22:11, Chris Mear <ch...@oneclickorgs.com> wrote:
> Can you give us some idea of the amendments and additions you need to make? Is it anything that would affect the way voting and membership currently happen within the app?

In this case, we're not making any immediate changes to the rules
surrounding voting. But it would still raise an issue if we wanted to
change any of these settings later on.

The organisation is the UK Hackspace Foundation, which is our UK
umbrella body for hackerspaces. We want to have another class of
(non-voting) membership for participating spaces, and codify the rules
on how money should be distributed to member spaces in the
constitution. None of this has any direct bearing on how OCO would
operate.

--
Russ Garrett
ru...@garrett.co.uk