RE: [chairs] Re: Quorum required for good standing

[Hal Lockhart <hlockhar@bea.com>]

The key point is that under the current rules, just by sending an email to
the chair and NEVER SHOWING UP for any meeting or call, a few people can
keep a TC from attaining quorum, EVER. The phenomenon of people signing up
and never showing up has occurred on every TC I have joined. Most of the TCs
I have joined have had repeated difficulties achieving quorum at some point
in their lifecycle, usually in the first few months.

In the "Organizing and Conducting Meetings" section of the Oasis TC
Guidelines it says:

"Only quorate meetings (majority of members in attendance) can be used to
determine membership based on attendance, and TC decisions can only be made
with quorum in attendance."

Hal

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Karl Best [mailto:karl.best@oasis-open.org]
> Sent: Friday, February 14, 2003 9:10 AM
> To: chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [chairs] Re: Quorum required for good standing
>
>
> The OASIS TC Process says that a person must attend two out of three
> meetings, but it doesn't define what consitutes a meeting. In
> all cases
> where the TC Process doesn't define something we must look to
> RRO. I've
> been under the impression that only quorate meetings would count for
> attendence rules, but I think that the reference Jon gave us
> would say
> otherwise.
>
> But you'll still want to keep track of attendence and send
> out warnings
> to people who don't attend because non-attending members make it
> difficult or impossible for the TC to ever achieve quorum and
> be able to
> transact business.
>
> -Karl
>
>
>
>
>
> Hal Lockhart wrote:
> > I agree completely with this. This one of the two changes I
> was going to
> > propose to the TC process. I had wanted to look up what
> Robert's says. Thank
> > you Jon.
> >
> > I have been in several TC where we would NEVER have
> achieved quorum if we
> > had not been ignorant of and not followed this rule. Every
> TC I have been
> > has a certain number of no shows and if you can't get rid
> of them w/o quorum
> > you are stuck.
> >
> > I think the OASIS process, regularly scheduled meetings,
> open archives and
> > minutes, ability of 10% of membership to veto a Standard,
> has adequate
> > safeguards to keep a small group from hijacking a TC.
> >
> > Hal
> >
> >
> >>-----Original Message-----
> >>From: Jon Bosak [mailto:Jon.Bosak@sun.com]
> >>Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2003 4:22 PM
> >>To: karl.best@oasis-open.org
> >>Cc: rphilpott@rsasecurity.com; chairs@lists.oasis-open.org;
> >>colin.evans@intel.com; ckurt@microsoft.com;
> eduardo.gutentag@sun.com;
> >>Donald.Bergeron@lexisnexis.com; leahyt@wellsfargo.com;
> >>zagelow@us.ibm.com; higgins@kavi.com
> >>Subject: Re: [chairs] Info for chair setup of Kavi TC areas
> >>
> >>
> >>| Yes, as I said above. A person will sign up for the TC, be made a
> >>| prospective member and assigned an Observer role, then converted
> >>| to Member after 60 days or three meetings. (This is another reason
> >>| that you need to keep track of meeting attendance. Only meetings
> >>| that achieve quorum count as valid meetings, and the number of
> >>| valid meetings is used to calculate the three meeting rule.)
> >>
> >>I don't think this is correct.  Good standing is (or should be)
> >>based on good-faith attempts to attend meetings.  Attendance at
> >>regularly scheduled meetings that fail to achieve a quorum should
> >>count for this.
> >>
> >>Robert's says:
> >>
> >>   ... if a quorum fails to appear at a regular or properly called
> >>   meeting, the inability to transact business does not detract
> >>   from the fact that the society's rules requiring the meeting to
> >>   be held were complied with and the meeting was convened ...
> >>   (pp. 341-342)
> >>
> >>I think this applies to both the three-meeting rule for
> >>prospective members and the two-out-of-three meetings rule for
> >>members in good standing.
> >>
> >>Jon
> >>
> >>
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> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> =================================================================
> Karl F. Best
> Vice President, OASIS
> +1 978.667.5115 x206
> karl.best@oasis-open.org  http://www.oasis-open.org
>
>
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