Required Meeting Attendance - Prospective Members

["B. Tommie Usdin" <btusdin@mulberrytech.com>]

If I have correctly interpreted who wrote what, Eduardo wrote:

At 7:36 PM -0800 2/26/01, Eduardo Gutentag wrote:
>One of the points of prospective membership, if memory does not fail
>me, was to ensure that new members would not come to their first meeting
>not knowing what the hell was going on, among other things (the other
>main reason being to prevent stacking). That we have not put any attendance
>requirements in the bylaws strikes me as a bug.

I disagree, especially since we don't require chairs to allow 
prospective members to attend those meetings.  We can't have it both 
ways: requiring them to attend but allowing them to be excluded. I 
think the current plan, which puts a significant time delay on 
joining, is enough to prevent packing a committee for a vote (the 
major thing we were trying to prevent), and allows people of good 
will to catch up with a committee's process before becoming members.

There is nothing we could do that would force people to get up to 
speed with the ongoing work; how many "active" members of various 
groups do we all know who don't pay attention at meetings, don't read 
the mail, and then object at length to something  - usually very late 
in the game?  By-laws can't create good sense, or good will.

-- Tommie
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B. Tommie Usdin                        mailto:btusdin@mulberrytech.com
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