At 5:20 PM -0700 4/7/00, Ginger <gingerh@shawneelink.com> wrote: >Well would someone please explain to me how we >can have a motion to overrule an action that the >NC had no right to take in the first place. > >He should have been declared out of order, which >he most certainly was! It is my feeling that instead >of declaring him out of order and instructing him to >refrain from any further actions of this nature that >we are setting a precedent for future boards. Moving >to, what basically amounts to a, veto of his actions >implies that he had the right to take those actions in >the first place. Which he clearly did not! Ginger, I don't think there is any such implication. I believe the motion was intended to BE a declaration by the Board that the NC has no authority to take such an action. To declare an NC's action (as opposed to a motion) to be "out of order", something official has to be done. Otherwise anyone such as the Secretary could declare any action "out of order", even simple ones like responding to letters requesting permission to link to the National site, which many of us have mentioned should not require Board permission. I'm not in any way suggesting that Executive Order 2000-E-1 is similar to answering a letter! I agree that it was flagrantly outside the ByLaws. My point is simply that we need to vote to make it official that the NC does not have that authority. And official actions are introduced via motions. There is indeed very much of a problem with the ByLaws requiring that all motions pass by a 2/3 majority. I think that is a terrible provision. If a motion to declare an NC's action to be illegal requires 2/3 approval to pass, then any NC with a 1/3 support on the Board can do anything illegal they want, by issuing one Executive Order after another, and those opposed needing 2/3 approval to override it! The blame for this problem does not lie with using motions to declare an NC's actions to be void and without authority, though. A motion is the proper way to do that. The fault is in the 2/3 majority clause. Traditionally, clauses that certain votes require more than a plurality to pass are reserved for a few specified actions, such as requiring 2/3 majority to pass a new tax or to forcibly unseat an officeholder - or to delink a project! Requiring a 2/3 majority to pass any motion makes the likelihood of change oversensitive as to whether the motion is worded so that change will occur when it passes versus when it fails. Some very good ideas get voted down because 35% of the Board opposes them, even though 65% think we should do it, and some dubious actions get allowed because somebody with web page control or directory access does them, and the Board needs 2/3 agreement to force them to undo whatever they did. Hopefully Motion 00-8 will pass with 2/3 majority, and then we can seat a Census Board rep, and then we can deal with the postponed Motion 00-6, and then maybe we can see about amending some of the ByLaws. I was hoping that getting the ball rolling on some of the worst ByLaws could be the major order of business this year. All of this Census Project hoo-hah has been a real distraction. I don't think there is that much of a problem with the two Census Projects the way they are. A bit confusing, yes, but not nearly as much of a headache as trying to force volunteers to merge when they don't want to, and getting everybody up-in-arms at being coerced. (As for Shari's Motion 00-6, I prefer Holly's proposal of a joint committee made up of volunteers from both Census projects, or Jim Powell's proposal of a fact-finding liason, to ANY solution worked out by the Board and handed down from on high, no matter how sound or fair or even positively inspired the Board's plan is. Volunteers are much likelier to abide by a plan they came up with together than one that was handed to them by decree, even if it turns out to be the same plan in the end.) -- Teri