Committee work beyond E balloting

[Rod Clark]

> This is a serious problem.  The Excomm committee is an
> un-elected entity doing the board business, if it is doing
> budget. Also, as I understand it, the Excomm meetings are NOT
> open to general members of SCNA or SCN.

Rich, 

   If we had an Executive Director, like a normal organization,
this discussion might well be moot. But we don't, and
unfortunately the Executive Committee has to substitute for an
ED. This creates a lot of confusion in people's minds, because
the board and ExComm membershps are almost identical. (Only one
board member isn't on ExComm, at present.)

   The board sets policy, does fundraising, and communicates
their vision for SCNA. The Executive Director (or in our case
the Executive Committee) runs the organization's operations,
draws up departmental budgets and staff job descriptions, hires
people and assigns them to tasks, reviews their performance,
etc. It's normal for an ED to be unelected, since the ED is
employed by and serves at the pleasure of the board. When the ED
holds a meeting with the organization's staff to hash out
operational matters before presenting a plan or budget to the
board, such a meeting ordinarily is not a public event. 

   This is the theoretical rationale behind having non-public
ExComm meetings. In practice, in SCN's peculiar situation of
relying on the goodwill and mutual knowledege exchange of many
volunteers for everything it does, this rationale has not worked
well and has continually irritated the volunteers. Maybe it
should be reviewed and modified further to better suit the
volunteer climate at SCN.

> It would not be absurd to note that by moving business and
> decision-making from the board to the EXcomm meeting, the
> board has avoided public access to decisions by moving many
> decisions to a secret and unelected group. It is good that
> Excomm minutes are published, but that information is after
> the decisions have been made, so there is no chance for member
> input or organization.

   This is pretty confused at present. Whatever else can be said
about it, I think we can say with some certainty that there
isn't yet enough communication with volunteers, about a number
of things that people are concerned about.

Rod

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