[penguicon-general] Bylaws Committee officially forming.

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

Rob had sent:
...
> So I take it you believe Debian would operate far more smoothly without
...
> And I was unaware we were attempting ot recreate the federal bureaucracy.
...
> Yes, the constitution has prevented Bush from doing anything that 100% of the
...
(yes, I chopped a lot out.)

Any social organization exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium.
"dynamic" means it changes.  Sooner or later, those changes exceed the
ability of the organization to adapt, and the organization fails.  So,
all social organizations are mortal.  Therefore, mortality is not itself
a sound basis for judging any idea or practice.  A better guide for the
value of some practice is how long that organization survives.  A better
guide for the value of some ideal is long and how widely spread that ideal
becomes.  Temporary failure is far less important here than permanent oblivion.

There may be people here who would claim that Bush has not been exploring
the far side of "grey", or that this isn't harmful to american ideals.
I'm not one of them, and I presume you aren't either.  At the very least,
it's pretty clear "the decider" is a greater fan of "rule by fiat"
than he is of the values of the declaration of independence.  I hope
you're not arguing "rule by fiat" is the preferable model.

A more interesting example of this is the french _Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen_.  Inspired by the Declaration
of Independence, drafted by La Fayette in 1789, it was soon widely
ignored in the excesses of the french revolution.  Nevertheless, it's a
governing instrument in modern french law & some of its principles are
today commonly accepted in international law.  This is an abject failure
if you look at the lifespan of the originating organization, or
of the immediate consequences.  It's an astounding success if you look
at the pervasive & positive impact it's had on today's world.

I mention these things only to give a sense that this is relatively
scale independent.  My own direct experience with an organization that
is smaller in terms of staff & board than penguicon, is that having a
"mission statement" is very helpful to creating a new organization
that can survive without deciding everything by "rule by fiat".  If I
understand your experience (and I'm sorry to hear that LinuCon is
apparently dead) it would seem an organization without an effective
"mission statement" might well not survive the departure of its founder.

It seems your personal experience with mission statements has been
negative.  If you're talking in a corporate sense, that's not surprising.
Mid-level managers generally work much more "by fiat" than "by vision".
The mission statement is going to seem awfully pointless in this
environment.  I've certainly seen lots of examples of this.  It takes
an exceptional top-level leader to make a mission statement matter in
any sigificant sized corporation.  Corporate culture can be remarkably
resistant to change, but it is not immune.

Fortunately penguicon is not big enough to qualify has having that
persistant a corporate culture.  It barely has mid-level managers, and
it surely qualifies as "small".  Also, Tracy *is* a top-level leader.
She's even pretty exceptional.  She's got a pretty good shot at making a
mission statement that matters, especially because she's not looking to
bring it down from on high carved on 13 tablets of stone; she's asking all
of us to help her craft something we can all support.  There's a pretty
good chance that a "consensus of vision" will occur here, if we let Tracy
do her thing.  That's really the important part of this process; the paper
statement that comes out the end is merely an addendum to the process.

Incidently, some guidelines for bylaws, mission statements, etc.:

A mission statement should be as general as possible.  Use it to
distinguish between what you want to do and what you don't want to do.
Don't use it just to describe what you want to do.  Try to write
something that can also encompass what you might want to do in
the future, that you can't guess at today.

Bylaws are your "constitution."  They should define the process for making
decisions.  They should not define or record the decisions actually made.
They certainly shouldn't incorporate the con suite operational manual.

You should also have "rules", "policy", operations manual, cheat sheets,
etc.  Most of this, and all of this that relates to operational matters,
does not belong in either the bylaws or the mission statement.  Instead,
this is recorded in things like the minutes of the board meetings, past
practices of registration ops,&etc, the rules spelled out in the program
book, notes from the previous year's volunteer, etc.
You are in fact setting up a bureaucracy when this all happens.
Indeed, as you note, you shouldn't be editting the bylaws to make this
happen, and a lot of this doesn't even need to be mentioned in the bylaws.

Asking if the plan is to do 501c3 is a fair question.  Asking if
it's going to be done now is a loaded question.  Getting 501c3 is not
necessarily hard.  You may have had better luck, but that I've seen, it
generally takes somebody about a week of hard work to do the research,
fill out the forms, and otherwise make it happen.  It's helpful but not
necessary to be a lawyer.  Unless the law has changed greatly, it's not
something you have to do right away, and there are downsides to doing
it at all, starting with extracting 1 week's worth of volunteer work
out of somebody who can do it.  This is very probably something Tracy
can leave up to some future board.

If Tracy and others are truely successful at all the above, there *will*
be more than 3 waves of people, and it's going to get harder and harder
to define or count those waves.

Anyways, I'm falling asleep.  I'd be surprised if the above exactly
matches what Tracy has in mind, but I hope I'm not that far off.
The above guidelines are from my personal experience with various small
organizations - I believe these to be workable, reliable, and easy,
though of course there are other ways.

					-Marcus