[penguicon-general] Bylaws Committee officially forming.

[Rob Landley]

On Wednesday 31 December 1969 7:00 pm, mdw-yahoo at quince.ifs.umich.edu wrote:
> 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".

Yeah, I'm wondering why we're using corporate-speak.  I think I'm staying out 
of it, myself.

> 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".

And we all know Debian is completely devoid of politics and operates far more 
smoothly than Gentoo or Ubuntu...

> 200 years ago, the US founding fathers 
> drafted such a statement.  They called it a "Declaration of Independence".

Which was a delaying tactic while they pro-independence delegates recovered 
from a passed motion requiring a unanimous vote to declare independence.  
(The movie 1776 did a great job with this one.)

And the country isn't goverened based on the declaration of independence, it's 
governed based on the constitution, but the basis for a lot of our legal 
system goes back to english common law anyway.

And I was unaware we were attempting ot recreate the federal bureaucracy.

> The "whatever you want to call it" is not just a useful tool for
> generating consensus on vision.

If you have consensus on vision you don't need the mission statement.  If you 
don't have consensus on vision, the mission statement ain't gonna help.  
However, consensus on vision isn't a black or white thing.  We have people 
far more interested in gaming than geekdom, or literary fandom than media 
fandom, or who just like Anime and Filk and want the rest of the con to stay 
out of their hair.  It's the chair's (and board's) job to balance stuff.

> 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.

The convention I founded in Austin (Linucon) _got_ 501c3 status.  We had it in 
place for Linucon 1.  I didn't have the depth of concom and the energy to 
keep running it, and the people I handed it off to could only manage one more 
year, so obviously I defer to Tracy in matters of sustaining things.  (She 
has a way bigger social network than I do, and has the temprament to manage 
people and not just projects.)

> 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... ]

Yes, the constitution has prevented Bush from doing anything that 100% of the 
country doesn't agree with whole-heartedly, and made sure he stayed away from 
anything remotely grey.

> 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.

Yeah, that strikes me as what we're doing.  What I haven't heard yet is _are_ 
we trying for 501c3 status?

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.