Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: Resignation from AFFS committee

[Chris Croughton]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 09:51:26AM +0100, Kevin Donnelly wrote:

> On Monday 06 Jun 2005 07:56, Chris Croughton wrote:
> > Oh boy, you left that one wide open!  Leaving aside a lot of things in
> > the Real World(tm) which weren't done at meetings and weren't minuted,
> > I've been on several committees now wher a lot of the decisions are
> > taken outside meetings, by phone calls (not conference calls, which
> > could be classed as a 'meeting' of sorts, but individual calls to
> > several of the committee members) and not minuted (indeed, one committee
> > I was on we kept no minutes at all, we kept our own lists of things we
> > had to do and that was all).  I can assure you that theings did indeed
> > 'happen'.
> 
> ??? This can certainly occur on committees which are answerable to no-one but 
> themselves.  I don't think you are suggesting that it should happen on a 
> committee which represents the membership of a formally-constituted body.

I'm not saying anything about what 'should' happen, I'm saying that it
does happen and that to pretend that it doesn't is silly.

> Or maybe you are, in which case I think a good few oversight bodies
> (eg the Charity Commission) would like to know about this innovative
> doctrine.  

What have the Charity Commission to do with anything?  AFFS isn't a
charity, nor the UK Usenet Committee, nor are any of the SF conventions
which which I have been associated.

> Decisions certainly get taken in the margins of meetings, but if there is any 
> suggestion that these decisions need to be publicly presented to a "higher" 
> authority, they must be formally put on the agenda of a later meeting and 
> minuted.  I don't think government business, for instance, would function 
> awfully well if Cabinet Committees decided to do away with the tiresome 
> business of minutes (and I have worked in this area in a previous life).  The 
> "slant" to be put on minutes is a different issue, but no-one (other than 
> yourself?) would suggest there shouldn't be minutes in the first place.

I'm not suggesting that there "shouldn't be minutes in the first place",
I'm saying that in fact there are many discussions and decisions which
are made outside formal meetings and that to suggest that they "didn't
happen" just because it wasn't a minuted meeting is silly.  Perhaps the
UK government calls everyone together to discuss and approve every
little thing, I don't know; I'm certain that there are many governments
and government departments where that doesn't happen (indeed, there are
quite a few which don't bother having committees at all, dictatorship is
so much more efficient).

The claim was that "If something didn't happen at a meeting, and is
therefore not minuted, then it didn't happen at all."  Do you agree with
that?  No email decisions, no phone decisions, nothing will do except a
proper meeting with official minutes?  That sounds like a recipe for
either having no decisions at all for months or for losing your
volunteers...

Chris C