Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: Proposed roadmap

[Alex Hudson]

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 11:33 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> Most meetings allow amendments to be offered to proposals and
> accepted by the proposer. I can't understand your unreasoned
> refusal to consider that.

My "refusal" isn't unreasoned by any means. If you don't know why I hold
a certain viewpoint, it would be nicer to ask me to explain myself
rather than just call me unreasoned. 

> The current meeting rules, visible at
> http://www.affs.org.uk/~mjr/admin/rfc-meetings.txt now make
> clear how amendments can happen.

I don't think amendments to constitutional proposals really fall within
that rule set - for a start, those rules don't take into account the
notice period and publication of terms than constitutional amendments
must meet.

I'm personally of the view that accepting amendments is spiritually
antagonistic to the publication requirements of the proposal;
particularly where the amendment mostly or wholly supercedes the
entirety of the proposal. 

Whether or not that is constitutionally unacceptable I don't know; the
practice of previous meetings is that it isn't, but I don't think we've
properly addressed the issue. I certainly feel I couldn't accept an
amendment to a constitutional proposal I put forward because that
doesn't give the membership the notice period I think they need to be
able to properly consider the proposal.

Now, the vast majority of proposals hopefully don't fall into that
category - most of what we consider at AGM are non-constitutional and
therefore don't have the same implications. And it means that any
constitutional amendment put forward should have had a wide discussion
before going to AGM to ensure that an amendment to it isn't necessary.
Last time I thought I had that; when I put it forward it wasn't for some
time that any problems at all were raised, and indeed people praised it.
Obviously, at AGM, it didn't receive the support it needed. C'est la
vie, we live and learn. Many smaller changes individually voted on seems
to be the way forward.

Cheers,

Alex.