[penguicon-general] Bylaws Committee officially forming.

[mdw-yahoo at quince.ifs.umich.edu]

Rob had sent:
> and likely a mission statement as well.
>
> I remember a meeting we had at IBM to come up with a mission statement for
> our
> department during a reorganization.  I was unaware that Penguicon had
> senior
> management (or a venture capitalist) to please.

If you *don't* have a shared vision for what happens, you will
likely get chaos.  Corporate-speak for the expression of a shared vision is
"mission statement".  15 years ago, I helped found grex.  We used the term
"manifesto" when we drafted such a paragraph.  Debian has such a statement.
They call it a "social contract".  200 years ago, the US founding fathers
drafted such a statement.  They called it a "Declaration of Independence".

The "whatever you want to call it" is not just a useful tool for
generating consensus on vision.  It's also useful when you want to explain
to others what you do.  In fact, you will probably *have* to generate such
a statement for others.  For instance, I believe the state of michigan
expects to see some such statement on bylaws.  The IRS will certainly
want to see some such statement when filing for any form of 501c status.

It *is* possible to get by without such a statement.  However it's
much harder.  Generally, there are 3 ways to do this:

tradition.  We've done this for 300 years...
	[ ask the british about the theory behind their
	constitutional law sometime... ]
consensus.  Everybody meets and chews it out at great length, until
	everybody present could recite nearly the same one without
	blinking.  [ in america today it would be surprising if such a
	convention didn't result in a written statement. ]
fiat.  The head cheese carries it in his/her head, and
	overrules any decision that's in violation.
	[ tends to be hard on minions if the organization
	pretends to be democratic. ]

If you incorporate, you will still need to create mumbo-jumbo for
the civil authorities, even if you don't intend for it to be useful.

				-Marcus Watts