New Bylaws Project

Welcome to the page where we collaborate to write new by-laws for Free Geek. These will eventually be passed through council and proposed to the existing board of directors. Please feel free to take part in the conversation.

Versions of the Bylaws

There are three main versions of the bylaws available on this wiki, and it can get confusing. Here is the key:

Free Geek Bylaws: This is a copy of the currently in effect, legal bylaws -- the ones we are changing. (Locked from casual edits.)

Proposed Bylaws Working Draft: This is where we are doing the active work. There are comments, deletion marks, and additions are noted. This makes for a rather noisy document. However, if you want to make comments directly this is the place to do it. (Available for editing.)

Proposed Bylaws Current Draft: This is the current, "in progress" draft, all cleaned up from extraneous comments, deletion marks, etc. It will change from time to time as it gets too cumbersome and we take snapshots. In the end it will be the proposal presented to council and the interim board. It is the easiest one to read if you want to see the current state of the proposal. (Locked from casual edits.)

Snapshots

As we worked through amending the old bylaws, the comments and deletion marks started to get in the way. When we update the current draft, we first create a read-only version of our noisy working copy, so we won't lose the history. Reading through the snapshots in chronological order should give you the most accurate and detailed picture of the whole conversation. (These are all locked from casual edits.)

Proposed Bylaws Snapshot 2005-07-14: This snapshot was taken on July 14, the morning after the third bylaws meeting.

Proposed Bylaws Snapshot 2005-07-29: This snapshot was taken on July 29, two days after the fourth bylaws meeting.

Proposed Bylaws Snapshot 2005-08-10: This snapshot was taken on August 8, just after the fifth bylaws meeting. Joe, the lawyer, will look at this and offer his cautions and final suggestions, but this is expected to go to the council relatively unchanged for approval on August 17.

Proposed Bylaws Snapshot 2005-08-17: This snapshot was taken on August 17, a week after the fifth bylaws meeting. Joe's changes were incorporated and a few clauses had been reverted. Committee members weighed in and then just before the council meeting this snapshot was taken.

Standing Resolutions

Some things don't belong in the bylaws (at least at this point), but we do want them formalized a bit. This can be done by standing resolutions. Here are some proposed standing resolutions (in very rough shape) that are related to the new bylaws project:

New Bylaws Working Group

The general consensus of the most recent Council Meeting was that in order to re-create the board of directors in a way that fits the spirit and direction of Free Geek, we will need to change the by-laws. The Council authorized a working group to draft proposed bylaws. The working group is open to any volunteer or staff member at Free Geek, including current board members. However, the initial people to commit to the task were:

Jeff Kane
Oso
Richard
Wren
Charno

Our job is to make sense of the discussion so far and draft by-laws that would then go to council for discussion and approval, and from there to the current board of directors. Members of the current Board of Directors (the interim board) are involved in this drafting; the Board and the bylaws group are meeting at the same time.

Meeting Times

The Interim Board and the Bylaws Working Group will be holding consecutive biweekly meetings on Wednesday evenings to work through this transition period. These meetings are open to the any Free Geek volunteer or staff member. The tentative dates are:

July 13
July 27
August 10
August 24

Location may change, but the meeting runs from 6 pm until 8 or 9 pm, at or near Free Geek.

Background reading

If you're new to the discussion, or just need the pointers all in one place for reference:

Read the Council Meeting Minutes where this was discussed
- Follow the thread. There are at least two more links here and here.
Read the current Free Geek Bylaws
Browse the discussion on the board of directors page
Also good to read the very short Eligibility for Council
Our Articles of Incorporation

Some Givens

(This is my sense of the discussion at the Council Meeting. If you were there, please fill in, raise questions, and make corrections.) RfS

Free Geek needs a board -- it's a legal requirement at a minimum.
Legally we're not a membership based organization (this is specified in the difficult-to-change Articles of Incorporation), though with some changes to the by-laws we could gain some of the elements of a membership based organization. Those changes are likely to cover so much material, that a rewrite of the by-laws would be warranted.
The Free Geek Community Council or the Free Geek Staff Collective are existing and vital entities, but are not mentioned in the current by-laws. If they are to be a part of the selection of the board process, they need to be defined.
The sense of the Council is that, long term, the board of directors should be selected by the Council and, practically speaking, should keep an eye on these areas:
- Fiduciary Responsibility: Making sure Free Geek is being run in a fiscally responsible way.
- Legal Responsibility: Making sure that Free Geek doesn't violate the law.
- Caretake the 501(c)(3) status: Making sure that Free Geek doesn't lose this valuable tax status.
- Serve the mission: Like all groups at Free Geek, the board should
- Perhaps other specific duties, to be added.
The board retains ultimate legal authority over Free Geek as an organization (that's just the nature of the beast), but it can delegate authority to other groups, and this can be encoded into the by-laws. For instance, the by-laws could state that the board delegates general policy making to the council and day to day operations to the staff collective, but retain the right to veto decisions that threaten Free Geek's legal or fiscal standing or 501(c)(3) status.
All of the items that will need to go into the by-laws coulen't be discussed at a council meeting. We will need to extrapolate and perhaps guess in some places, but we should point out where we do this and invite discussion here and on the Council email list.

Outline of the proposed by-laws

To kick things off we can start by editing the current bylaws. There's a special page for this at Annotations on the old Bylaws. There will be a bunch of stuff that we expect everyone will agree on without a lot of discussion, and that stuff can go there. (Anything that requires a bit more work could be hashed out more informally?)

Here are some topics to consider, with links to pages where those topics can be discussed a bit more (without creating one giant discussion page):

Codifying the Council: The Free Geek Community Council isn't mentioned in the current bylaws. There'rs some substantial stuff written about how it works, however. What should go into the new bylaws?
Codifying the Staff Collective: The Free Geek Staff Collective isn't mentioned in the current bylaws. There're a lot of procedures and policies in place, however. What should go into the new bylaws?
Selection of the Board: What are the mechanisms of selecting the board? What about when there are unexpected vacancies? What about when we fall below our minimum number of members?
Makeup of the Board: How specific should we get in spelling out what kind of qualifications board members need? How much can be left to policy and how much should be in the bylaws?
Board Decision Making Process: The original (unammended) bylaws mention majority vote in some places. At an early board meeting (rumour has it) an ammendment was passed to use formal consensus with a limit of how many lifetime blocks (3?) a board member could use. What do we want in the new bylaws?
Delegation of Authority: Boards hold the final legal authority for corporations, but they can delegate areas of authority to other groups. Which areas of authority do we want delegated to Council and the Staff Collective? Which should be retained by the board? (NOTE: The sense of the Council was that general fiscal and legal authority should be retained by the board, as well as specifically the matter of protecting our 501(c)(3) status. The mission of the organization should be the responsibility of the board as well, but all the groups should be protecting the mission anyway.)

New Bylaws Project

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