Talk:Bylaws

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Proposed Bylaws! Read this over; modify it according to your desires and judgement; fix typos, fill in blanks, and rephrase (with particular attention to the italicized bits).

Let's keep any actual discussion on the discussion page, since we've got one, instead of marking up the text of the proposed Bylaws with comments or questions.

One thing that should be discussed is the scope of the bylaws. There are good arguments to be made that they should be as small as possible, and limit us as little as possible, within what's legal. That's pretty much the direction we've taken in getting this far; if you have arguments for a more comprehensive set of bylaws let's hear them.

2008-05-20: We hacked them up a bit but became dispirited and halted in the middle. Please help! Save the kittens. Edit the bylaws. In particular the Membership bits are duplicated with varying degrees of specificity. I left a line in between the two sections we were attempting to combine.

2008-05-22: I just made significant changes to the membership section. I combined and simplified what we had, and imported a few ideas from the CIRGIS bylaws. In most places where we had contradictory statements I kept the simplest one. --Noahbalmer 15:36, 22 May 2008 (PDT)

2008-06-18: Bylaws edited to reflect option 2, as decided by the meeting that started on the 17th... a report is being added by the newly designated Secretary, David Molnar, or his delegate. Rachel 00:31, 18 June 2008 (PDT)

Some things to consider:

  • Amendments to bylaws: I think these should have to be approved by 2/3 of members as well as 2/3 of directors.
  • Name - Current discussion over email seems to be favor Noisebridge or Noise Bridge rather than Noisebridge Research, once it's decided, fix everywhere -- Changed to "Noisebridge" 5/22/08
  • address may need apartment or mailbox number to be valid mailing address
  • article membership section rights of members: I added the bit about rights granted by the board, to avoid limiting the rights of members to those stated, but perhaps there's a better way to ensure this.
  • article membership section members: does board or treasurer decide dues? Should we have/require membership applications/waivers?

Suggest exact Dues not be specified in the Bylaws, but instead established by Board resolution. We want flexibility here. I would agree with stating in the Bylaws that dues schedule and dues paid for each members shall be available for inspection by all members. --DavidMolnar

  • article membership section quorum: is 1/3 quorum and majority to pass resolution what we want?
  • I think funny is ok, as long as we make sure it doesn't cause enforceability problems, i.e. throwing in a rule that prohibits feeding more than one officer to wild yetis on a full moon is fine, because this language would have no relevance to any situation that doesn't involve feeding plural officers to cryptids. On the other hand, a rule requiring human sacrifice to cthulhu in order to nominate a board member would be a problem, since it has bearing any time someone gets nominated.

This makes sense, but I would still prefer to remove the cute bits. With luck no one will ever need to read the Bylaws...but if someone does, it could be a judge, a bank officer, or someone else who may become confused by even logically inoperative rules. For example, current draft says that if Cthulhu rises then meetings are adjourned forever. We all know(?) that this will never(?) happen, but if you've never heard of Cthulhu before it just seems odd. So I favor removing them, even though I put most of them in to begin with. --DavidMolnar


  • the CIRGIS bylaws linked below look like a pretty good model to refer to.


A really detailed set of Bylaws

http://www.insightcced.org/uploads///publications/legal/mbylawsmember.pdf

Much simpler:

http://www.cirgis.org/docs/CIRGIS_Corporate_Bylaws.pdf

BylawsOfLysator as comparision of what Swedes do.

nolo samples

I've uploaded the Nolo docs to http://web.hexapodia.org/~adi/tmp/nolo-files/ in both RTF and text.

Adi