[RadioExam Dev] charter ready to send to the board?

[Heather Stern]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 11:52:46PM -0800, Ian Kluft wrote:
> I'd like to discuss whether the RadioExam charter is ready to send to
> the Board of Directors for approval.  If yes, please say so.  If not,
> what changes does it need?
>    http://wiki.sbay.org/twiki/bin/view/SIGs/RadioExamCharterDiscussion
> 
> The board will probably discuss scheduling a meeting as soon as the election
> is done over the weekend.

I've dug up the "SIG Charters" section of the bylaws-in-plain-English to use
as a checklist.

Summary:  it looks like we've got all the parts, I only saw one spot where
we might want to tune it up.

12.6  SIG Charters
      SIG charters contain:
[*]     - their purpose statement
[*]     - "Special Interest Group of the South Bay Community Network, Inc.,
           a California non-profit corporation."
[*]     - that it's organized under article 12 of these bylaws
[ ]     - definitions of these things:
[+]       * their Officer positions, with roles and duties described

We might want to say "oversees the SIG" and "are officers of this SIG" since
some people reading too fast might think "the organization" somehow refers
to Sbay as a whole, and that[having SIG leaders have to be officers
'upstream' within Sbay] would severely limit who could help steer a
software dev project, possibly to people who just aren't cut out to do
software-dev leadership if the crew running Sbay overall changes much.

The duties we currently describe are the vague minimum "here to do what the
SIG needs to do, per its bylaws and the parent org's requirements".  Would
we like to call out any particular roles?  Or come up with them as a charter
amendment later?

A possible role might be whoever's at the heart of the source-control
software, this being a software dev SIG.

[+]       * a title for their leader

We seem to be defaulting to "SIG Coordinator". If that's ok I'm ok with it
too.

[*]       * a method for selecting the leader, pick one:
 (*)        + elected by SIG participants

by one level of indirection;  its Steering Committee is elected, then its
Committee selects one among themselves to be Coordinator.  It can be argued
that this is the reason that its Steering Committee members all need to be
corp members too, because they all need to qualify for the Coordinator post
- even if we didn't require it per the item below.

 ( )        + appointed by the President
 ( )        + elected by the Board


[*]     - their method of removing officers
[*]     - their method of creating and deleting volunteer positions
[*]     - which officer position within the SIG matches the "SIG Coordinator"
          position within the corporation
[*]     - their procedures regarding voting on issues within the SIG
[*]     - their method of updating their own rules and policies
[*]     - the SIG Officers must be members in good standing of the corp.
          (Since the Board accepting the Application means accepting the SIG 
          Officers they already had, this seems to come for free to the first 
          batch of officers. But maybe we should make that explicit?)
[*]     - If Officer positions are elected, describes an election method for 
          them.
[*]     - Any officer or volunteer can be removed from their post by the 
          corp's Board. (type of vote not mentioned, so simple majority)
[*]     - Honor the corporate email list policies
[*]     - SIG policies can be removed by the Board. (vote type not mentioned,
          so simple majority)
[*]     - bylaws/corp policy/feds/state/local law override SIG policy.
          The overridden policy will be cancelled by the discovering Board or
          SIG Officers, and returned to its author with comments. 
[*]     - Decision making procedures in Article 6 also govern SIGs. The SIG
          Coordinator supports and enforces this, and acts as arbiter when 
          one is needed.
[*]     - Amending a SIG charter: announce the proposal to the SIG members and
          approve it by:
          * 2/3 simplae majority of the SIG members, and a simple majority of 
            the Board
          * 2/3 absolute majority of the Board.

      These required items apply to the SIGs even if they aren't written in;
      a charter missing them will be amended to add required statements. 
      (which is somewhat of a shortcut for being able to submit a charter 
       with only the variable portions filled in, and let it get fixed into
       shape.)

[*]     (It does not require: how the SIG accepts members of its own.)

However, this charter does list it, and the description looks good to me.


  . | .    Heather Stern          |   
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