On 20 February 2013 11:17, Andrew Turvey andrewrturvey@googlemail.com wrote:
I presume this decision was taken at the last board meeting on 9-10 February. It's very disappointing that the draft minutes of the last board meeting still haven't been published, a week and a half after the meeting. I asked when this would be published over a week ago and was told that a reasonably final draft was available on Sunday. Chapter policy says that "Volunteers are encouraged to ... hold the Trustees and staff to account, through public and private discussion". [2] It's impossible to do this if we're not even allowed to see on a timely basis the decisions that are being made by the board.
Publishing draft minutes is quite unusual for a board - most I'm aware of don't publish minutes until they are formally approved at the next meeting (which can be months later) - so I'm not sure a week and a half really qualifies as untimely. I doubt the minutes say much, any way. The discussion was presumably in camera, so there will just be the final decision in the public minutes and we've already been told about that.
So, transparency doesn't seem to be an issue here. Proper board recruitment processes do seem to be an issue, though - it doesn't sound like they even interviewed anyone else... When Saad and I were co-opted, we had been through the election process and secured the support of members (just not as much support as other candidates), so the board could have reasonable confidence that we were appropriate choices. When you are co-opting someone that has been completely uninvolved before, a much more thorough review process is required and it doesn't sound like that happened in this case.
(To be clear - Greyham sounds like a very good choice, but I see no evidence that he was the best choice available.)