At 7:23 PM -0700 9/2/99, Ginger wrote: >Hi Teri, >While in essence I agree with your proposal the Board >is only authorized to propose amendments under certain >circumstances. >This needs to be either left to a possible future Bylaws >Review committee or it should be an individual proposal >in one's home state, following the procedure outlined in the >Bylaws. Neither the Board nor the SC list have the authority >to propose Bylaws outside of the current procedure set forth >in the Bylaws. While we may not agree with all aspects of >the Bylaws, and there is definitely room for improvement, we >also can not ignore them and forge ahead at will. The Bylaws >were voted in by the membership of the project and as such >it is our duty as a Board to adhere to them. > >Ginger >gingerh@shawneelink.com Ginger, I fully agree. I was intending that everything would proceed according to the procedures set out in the By-Laws. I wasn't proposing ignoring anything at all. According to the By-Laws, a "state project" has to officially propose an amendment, and 5 other state projects have to co-sponsor it, before it can be voted on: - ------------------------------ ARTICLE XVI. AMENDMENT TO BYLAWS Section 2. Any state project may propose an amendment by sending their proposal to one or more of the Advisory board members representing their region and including the exact wording of the proposed amendment. Upon receipt of the proposed amendment, the Advisory Board representative(s) shall request the Webmaster to post the proposed change on the national website and the National Coordinator to post to the State-Coord-L List, and any other appropriate lists, for dissemination to the members. Section 3. The proposed amendment, with the sponsor's name and date of posting, shall remain posted for a period of at least thirty (30) days prior to the annual voting period of July 1-July 31. Any proposed amendment shall require a minimum of five (5) states as co-sponsors to command that it be placed on the ballot. State projects wishing to co-sponsor the amendment shall notify the Advisory Board and make an announcement on the USGenWeb-All Mailing List. - ------------------------------ Now, this says nothing about how a "state project" gets to the point of proposing or co-sponsoring a By-Law, but a reasonable interpretation is that the CC's of that state would vote on it. (The procedure may have been left unspecified to allow each state to have its own rules for how it goes about deciding to propose or co-sponsor an amendment.) And how it gets to the point of being presented as a possibility to the CC's of the first state is wide open. I would think anyone whatsoever, even a random site visitor who isn't part of the Project, could suggest a possible amendment to someone else who is in a position to officially start the ball rolling in their state. Just as anyone in the world, not even necessarily a citizen of the United States, can write a letter to a member of Congress asking "could you please submit this as a bill for me?" (And a lot of them do. You might be surprised at the number of bills making special exceptions for individuals.) A member of Congress has to submit each bill, but it doesn't have to be their own original idea. That's what I was proposing to do, to write to the state coordinators, simply as one individual to another, not as a Board member, saying "Here's an idea. Would any of you like to propose something like this to the CC's in your state?" If nobody in any state takes it to their CC's, then that's the end of it. // Teri pettit@adobe.com