Having positions is good, even if only good practice for how things will be when you're incorporated. A chair should be a person who is organized and who can can lead meetings and keep them on track. A vice chair can step in to oversee meetings if the chair is missing. A secretary will be responsible for ensuring things like meeting transcripts are posted publicly, and ensuring that the board is in good communication with the community. Treasurer isn't needed till you have money, but again, it's good practice and you are going to need somebody eventually.

Not being professional or focused at this stage will only hurt the chapter in the long run. I suggest everybody take this stuff very seriously.

I'm not sure a vice chair is really necessary for such a small board. I would just decide that in the absence of the chair, the secretary chairs meetings, and in the absence of both, the treasurer does. In the absence of all 3, there is barely a quorum, so hopefully that won't happen too much, if it does the 2 people left can decide between themselves or just toss a coin - chairing a meeting of two people isn't a lot of work!

At 19:23 -0400 1/10/08, Andrew Whitworth wrote:

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:

...

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#2 Assigning positions beyond those mandated by law (that is to say, secretary)

Chair is the only position mandated by law. The requirement to have a secretary was abolished in the Companies Act 2006, although I would strongly suggest having one anyway. You'll also need a treasurer as soon as the incorporation is done, so you may want to assign one now. I'd hold off on any other positions for now, if I were you.

Having positions is good, even if only good practice for how things will be when you're incorporated. A chair should be a person who is organized and who can can lead meetings and keep them on track. A vice chair can step in to oversee meetings if the chair is missing. A secretary will be responsible for ensuring things like meeting transcripts are posted publicly, and ensuring that the board is in good communication with the community. Treasurer isn't needed till you have money, but again, it's good practice and you are going to need somebody eventually.

Not being professional or focused at this stage will only hurt the chapter in the long run. I suggest everybody take this stuff very seriously.

--Andrew Whitworth

The Secretary of any incorporated body can a very different thing for different bodies. For example, the minutes of meetings are sometimes taken by the Secretary, sometimes an assistant. Each body can settle on what fits. For example, I am an Assitant Secretary and I sometimes take the minutes of meetings.

A Secretary can also act almost as a vice Chair. And the Secretary and Chair could be the same person (in some bodies).

Here's a suggestion - get some training? Free training might be available: it is for charities in my borough. Courses like:

"Management Committee - Roles and Responsibilities"

I cannot find the exact link, but there are similar courses that might be of interest to the Committee here:

http://www.impactfactory.com/p/management_training_skill_development/issues_...

Gordo

Mostly reasonable enough. My point on positions was that since this board was only going to be around for three months it might be more efficient to assign tasks on a task by task basis rather than a role by role one, particularly as assignments of tasks should require much less discussion than assignment of roles. This certainly does not mean that we'd be in an "everyone thought someone else would do it" situation, as those task assignments would be a matter of public record. A task based approach also keeps at least some collective responsibility for things getting done for the whole board, which to me seems right, since if we fail, we fail as an ensemble. It also means that when the job of one "role" can be parallelized, it will be.

You write: "There are other times that retreating in camera will probably be required, e.g. discussion of new members where personal info needs to be shared/discussed." This raises an interesting question we were briefly discussing on IRC last night: namely is there any situation where we would reject the membership application of someone who met the legal requirements? I can imagine we may decide to eventually reject those who had not paid supporting membership fees, but I really cannot see any reason for blocking an application beyond this. I certainly think it would be wrong to tie membership to on wiki activity or seniority in the community. Does anyone have strong opinions the other way?

As for opening up voting results, I should probably note that the email you were replying to was by Thomas Dalton (Tango) not me... The main reason I think to want to do it is just that "it's the done thing" which rather suggests that people smarter than us have decided it's optimal. Openness is good in itself, it provides some minimal verification of the results, and it's also important for future elections: it means candidates can see what was popular previously, it means they can decide if there's any point them making the effort to stand in future and it means voters can potentially adjust their voting strategy for tactical reasons in future (just imagine how hard it would be for e.g. people with both labour and liberal sympathies to decide how to vote in tory constituencies if they did not know the historical tallies). It may also provide the fairest way of deciding upon a chair...

Tom

-----Original Message----- From: wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Peel Sent: 02 October 2008 08:58 To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] WMUK Agenda

Tom et al.,

Sending to the list as this discussion shouldn't be private. Unless we start getting significant numbers of "too much traffic" complaints, we should be discussing everything publically. (Sorry guys, I don't mean to be an arse.)

Fine with me.

Reply to the below, apologies if this sounds a little adversarial, I'm just trying to keep us focussed on what's important:

OK; I'll use the same approach then. :)

#1 That was not a formal election and we are not at this point a formal board. Lets leave the bureaucracy behind until it's legally necessary.

It's something that will only take a few minutes, and it would be good to have it recorded in the meeting notes.

#2 Assigning positions beyond those mandated by law (that is to say, secretary) at this point is a bit of a waste of time. We're a small board and it will generally be more efficient to assign jobs on a case by case basis until after the AGM at which point many of us may no longer be on the board and WMUK can start doing what it was set up to do. Lets not play the "handing out basically meaningless roles" game.

The rationale behind having 5 positions for 5 people is that it evens out the workload, so that everyone has a main-stay useful thing that they are doing. It doesn't preclude people from doing other things. As a minimum, we need the three positions: chair, secretary, treasurer. They may not be legally mandated, but meetings won't go smoothly if we don't have a chair (as an example; the chair of course will do more than that), we need someone who is in charge of the actual paperwork, and we need someone who is in charge of opening the bank account, and keeping track of any expenses that may occur as we go along.

Membership was something that was notably weak in WMUK1, so it would be good to have someone in charge of that. Communications (mainly external) would also be useful, although the chair could conceivably do that.

#3 Weekly meetings are fine, but they must not become an excuse for delaying decision making until the next meeting. This list and general IRC should be fine for most of the required discussions. The only circumstance when we should be forced to retreat to meetings for decisions is when someone on the board objects to the consensus decision and a board vote is necessary.

Weekly meetings would be good for keeping things going. I concur that they must not be an excuse for delaying decisions, but on the flip side we shouldn't rush things - so if things need to be delayed by a week, so be it. There are other times that retreating in camera will probably be required, e.g. discussion of new members where personal info needs to be shared/discussed.

#4 This can wait a while. Once everything is squared with chapters committee we'll get an internal wiki and at that point someone can ask JamesF nicely to transfer the domain. (This has been much discussed already.)

True, it can wait, but it would be good to make a start on it sooner rather than later (although the same applies for everything else too...)

#5 The MoA and AoA are what we need to discuss. They've been talked about a fair bit on this list already, and I got the impression that we'd agreed that we want to basically replicate the changes made by Alison to the original template. If someone (Tango? Alison?) has a list of these changes we can discuss them one by one in the meeting. We also need to discuss the objectives. The objectives list here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Wikimedia_UK_v2.0/Objectives is currently those of WMUK 1.0 with a few that I shoved on the front last month. None of these have really been discussed. We certainly won't make a final decision at the meeting (not least because everything has to be run past my tame-barrister and any other legal advice we're getting), but there's no reason we can't have a good bash at a draft by the end of it.

Yup; I agree that this is the main thing to discuss. Hearing Tango's and Alison's comments (and anyone else's) on the standard MoA and AoA we have on the meta at the moment would be great. Whether the board meeting is the right place for an in-depth discussion of the MoA/AoA/ objectives is another question; wouldn't that best be done on this list first?

The only other thing to discuss is whether there are any strong objections to the voting tallies becoming public. Perhaps this will have to be our first board vote (though since the mini-"electoral commission" are completely independent of us they are not at all obliged to listen to anything we decide on the matter).

I think it would be good to have a (short?) discussion about this, probably including people in #wikimedia-uk. I don't particularly care either way, but at the same time I'm not entirely convinced by the reasons you gave for wanting the tallies made public - perhaps you can convince me?

From your email: 1. isn't a good reason, 2. if someone did resign, what difference would knowing the tallies actually make? Bear in mind that only the 5 of us made the 50% mark. 3. I would hope that people would recognize that their votes at AGMs matter anyway, regardless of the tallies from this election. 4. Is there anything we could learn from the counts that we wouldn't figure out anyway?

Tom

Mike

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 2:36 PM, Tom Holden thomas.holden@gmail.com wrote:

Mostly reasonable enough. My point on positions was that since this board was only going to be around for three months it might be more efficient to assign tasks on a task by task basis rather than a role by role one, particularly as assignments of tasks should require much less discussion than assignment of roles. This certainly does not mean that we'd be in an "everyone thought someone else would do it" situation, as those task assignments would be a matter of public record. A task based approach also keeps at least some collective responsibility for things getting done for the whole board, which to me seems right, since if we fail, we fail as an ensemble. It also means that when the job of one "role" can be parallelized, it will be.

I don't see the task and role based approaches as necessarily exclusive. There are some roles which we are legally required, or strongly advised, to create. Beyond that, there are tasks we are aware will be required and will be ongoing (such as membership and communications). If one or more board members wants to take responsibility for an overview of these, and probably doing the main share of the work on them, then it seems sensible to formalise it as a role; this doesn't preclude the board in future mandating someone else to take on part of the task, or the person taking on the role from asking other members to assist as needed.

Meanwhile, there are many specific tasks which will not be ongoing concerns, and even if we wanted to avoid a task-based approach, it would be difficult to avoid it for all of these.