Membership Meeting Process and Agenda

DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT

Overview/History

Below is a draft process proposal for handling our membership meeting this summer, tentatively scheduled for Sunday, October 28.

It's based largely on the process we used in 2011. The main changes from last year's meeting:

• Instead of reading the reports and then having a discussion, we will distribute the reports and invite a handful of members or other people to comment on the political report as a prelude to discussion. This avoids needless time reading reports, offers a more interesting draw for our members (if we can bring known people to comment), and helps frame the membership meeting around topics useful for us to be discussing.
• Instead of pre-seeding the collaborative democracy workshop with priorities written by the directors, we will design a survey to ask for feedback on a lightly revised set of priorities based on the 6 we agreed to last year, with an option to propose a new priority area. The priorities will be revised to help demonstrate the scope of a "guideline" to help generate more useful feedback. We will use the results of the survey to prepoluate the list of priorities for this year's collaborative democracy workshop.,
• Direct video link between Mexico City and New York City, with equal presentation from both cities.
• Instead of limiting voting to a one hour period at the meeting, allow voting to happen for a full week, online-only (any who wants to vote at the meeting in person will be provided with assistance in voting online), up to one hour prior to the end of the meeting

It is also based on the draft structure document that the leadership committee has discussed and partially but not fully approved (we approved the LC decision making process). The main departure from the draft structure is allowing members to directly make proposals to the membership, rather than relying on the leadership committee to make proposals

Pre-meeting organizing

September 15 - October 15

• Announce request for nominations for the leadership committee. This announcement should be accompanied by a leadership committee job description, that describes what is expected if you are elected to the leadership committee. Leadership committee nominees will be expected to provide a statement of their goals for the organization.
• Send survey of proposed priorities to the membership, which should come with guidelines for priorities, to ensure that we are not wasting our time discussing priorities that MFPL can't implement or that are clearly out of scope for our organization.

September 8

• All staff reports (political/overview, accounting, support/infrastructure, méxico, and international) written and distributed to the membership

Elections

October 21 - October 28

Members will be invited to vote for the leadership committee. All voting will happen via the web. Only members who have joined prior to June 1, 2012 and are in good standing (up to date on dues payments) will be allowed to vote. Individual members will have a weigted vote of 1, organization members will have a weighted vote of 2. A quorum of 10% of all members is required for the vote to be valid. The number of all members will be calculated in the following way for the purposes of determining quorum: total number of members in good standing as of the last day of voting minus all members who joined after June 1, 2012. The top 15 vote getters will be elected to the leadership committee. The voting will be closed at 3:15 pm America/New_York time on September 15 and the results will be announced soon after.

Membership Meeting

10:00 am - 5:00 pm America/New_York time

• 09:00 am - 10:00 am: bagels/coffee
• 10:00 am - 10:30 am: Welcome and introductions of LC, staff, support team and internationalization team
• 10:30 am - 11:15 am: Guest speakers respond to political report
• 11:15 am - 12:30 pm: Questions and discussions from the audience
• 12:30 pm - 01:30 pm: Lunch
• 01:30 pm - 01:45 pm: Explanation of collaborative Democracy workshop
• 01:45 pm - 03:30 pm: ​Collaborative Democracy workshop, pre-seeded with propolals submitted in August. Proposals endorsed by 75% of participating groups are considered approved
• 03:30 pm - 03:45 pm: Announcement of Leadership committee winners
• 03:45 pm - 04:15 pm: Break
• 04:15 pm - 05:00 pm: Wrap up, closing comments