Blessing committees in progress

[Jon Bosak <bosak@boethius.eng.sun.com>]

Unless I'm missing something, the current practice of allowing OASIS
members to join committees at will is, strictly speaking, illegal and
should probably stop.  To be conformant to the current rules as I
understand them, committee membership should be established when a
committee is formed and changed thereafter only by a specific action
of the board.  (Please note I would like to be proven wrong in my
analysis of this matter.)

Supposing I'm right, I don't think that we should act like the house
is on fire about this.  Since our process has failed by being, if
anything, too inclusionary, I think that it would be hard for an
unfriendly agency to demonstrate harm in this area because we have, in
fact, done no one wrong.  But now that we've noticed this, we should
fix it.

I recommend the following interim procedure for blessing existing
OASIS committees:

   Ask the chair of each committee to provide a paragraph
   describing the goal of the committee (this should already be
   on file somewhere) together with a list of what he or she
   considers to be its actual current membership.  "Actual
   membership" means the people who are known to be making
   material contributions to the work of the committee and who
   habitually vote when a question is put to them; otherwise the
   committees will be unable to achieve a quorum.  Submit the
   goal and current membership to the board for approval as the
   committee charter.  If the chair is unable to form a list as
   described, treat it as a new committee according to the
   procedure below.

I don't think that this part is real hard.

New committees should be required to provide the following minimum
charter:

   1. The name of someone willing to act as the chair.

   2. The names of OASIS members committed to carrying out the work.

   3. A statement of the purpose and goals of the committee.

Then the board can approve the charter, including the persons
specifically named as chair and members of the committee.  This
shouldn't be terribly hard, either.

Here's the hard part: under the Robert's process invoked by the
bylaws, new members cannot be allowed to join committees once formed
without being individually approved by the board, so once established,
membership in committees will have to be handled by continuing board
action.  This process is clearly not intended as a long-term solution,
and I suggest it only because we are working on a wholesale
replacement of the current system.  Being pure Robert's, the interim
process is in theory indefinitely sustainable, though quite painful
for the board and not scalable to large numbers of committees.

Note that in the absence of an enforceable automatic exclusion
mechanism to remove unresponsive members, the new committees will
probably have to be restarted at intervals by direct intervention of
the board when they have accumulated enough deadwood that they can't
form a quorum or hold votes.

Jon