Ellen, Your proposal sounds like a good one to me, with the exception of the provision to disqualify from the special committee anyone who has ever "been involved in any aspect of any Archives and/or Census projects." At 5:39 AM -0700 4/16/00, Ellen Pack wrote: > I submit that there is only one way this horrendous problem will be solved, > and that is by removing the decision from the involved parties, including > the AB, and turning it over to the general membership. This is what I have been saying for years, about *all* major decisions. My opinion is that what we need is a "Members' Bill of Rights" laying out what kind of things each page owner can make decisions about without anybody telling them what to do (what host to use for their pages being the major one), and what kind of decisions they can't make on their own (delinking another subproject being the major one). The latter class of decisions should be made by the general membership, not by any elected body. Consider this message I wrote in June 1998, when we were about to vote on the ByLaws. If you substitute "Special Project" for "State Project" or "state", it sounds like a prediction of the situation we have today: % A much more likely situation for a national committee to have to deal % with is two individuals both claiming to have the definitive or approved % page for their state, and both of them linking to mostly the same set % of county pages, with perhaps a few differences. How do they determine % which state page is the real one? Poll the county coordinators of that % state? But without an official state page, how do you decide who the 'real' % county coordinators are? Saying that the decision about who is a state % coordinator should be made from the bottom up is good as long as the % state's volunteers come up with a single choice, but it yields a chicken % and egg problem when there is division within the state. % % So the national organization must have some guidelines for how to pick % an official state page when there are multiple contenders, or how to pick % people to maintain the national pages. % % I recognize this need, but I think that having regional representatives, % state coordinator representatives, county coordinator representatives, % etc., etc., is too much bureaucracy for dealing with the rare decisions % to be made at that level. % % Rather that a "board", I think the bylaws should consist of *process* % guidelines for what kind of decisions are entirely up to the discretion % of the national coordinator (e.g., background color on their pages), and % which decisions they must defer to the volunteers below them, and how % the input of the volunteers below them is to be obtained. (See http://www.best.com/~tpettit/usgenweb/Re_Vote.html At 5:39 AM -0700 4/16/00, Ellen Pack wrote: >To that end, I would strongly suggest the appointment of a special >committee comprised of at-large USGW members. Those members should not be >or have been in any position of USGW authority, i.e. SC's, ASCs, Board >Reps, etc. They should never have been involved in any aspect of any >Archives and/or Census projects, and should not hold known pre-conceived >opinions of the current situation, or maintain personal associations with >Archive/Census members or Board reps. The volunteers most affected by any revision to the ByLaws dealing with Special Projects would be the volunteers of those Special Projects, especially the transcribers. To make major decisions about the rules they are expected to work under without their having any say at all in the construction of the proposed amendments seems backwards to me. If the committee contains no grass-roots members of any of the Special Project, it will be severely underinformed as to what the concerns are of the volunteers who will be working for those projects. Would you propose that a committee to construct an amendment dealing with guidelines for Local Projects automatically disqualify anyone who had ever worked on a county site? There should be no second-class citizens in the USGenWeb Project. The volunteers of the Special Projects are just as much part of the USGenWeb Project as are the volunteers of the State Projects and the Local Projects. They not only have the strongest right to make the rules that they will be working under, they also are the most knowledgeable about what the problems and issues are. -- Teri Pettit (CC since June 1996 Advisory Board Member since August 1999 never worked on any Special Project)