Jump to content
The Official RONR Q & A Forums

email correspondence of board members


Georgia Bulldawg 983

Recommended Posts

Our organization has a governing board with a chair, vice-chair, treasurer, secretary, and committee heads as members of governing board.  our constitution states that all governing board members are also advisory non-voting members of each committee.  Should all board correspondence include the advisory non voting members of the committee in email chains, especially since the committees sometimes have email votes?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Georgia Bulldawg, it's ultimately up to your organization to interpret its own bylaws and to determine what rights "advisory non-voting members" of committees have.  RONR does not provide for members such as those and considers "members" to be only members who have all rights of membership, which would include the right to vote.  Any other classes of members and their rights would have to be set out in your bylaws or determined by your organization by interpreting its bylaws.

The following definition of a "member" or an organization from page three of RONR might be of help:  "A member of an assembly, in the parliamentary sense, as mentioned above, is a person entitled to full participation in its proceedings, that is, as explained in 3 and 4, the right to attend meetings, to make motions, to speak in debate, and to vote. No member can be individually deprived of these basic rights of membership—or of any basic rights concomitant to them, such as the right to make nominations or to give previous notice of a motion—except through disciplinary proceedings. Some organized societies define additional classes of "membership" that do not entail all of these rights. Whenever the term member is used in this book, it refers to full participating membership in the assembly unless otherwise specified. Such members are also described as "voting members" when it is necessary to make a distinction. "

I wish we could help you more, but RONR simply does not get into the rights of people who are less than full members with all rights of membership.

Good luck.

Sincerely,

An Ole Miss Rebel in New Orleans :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

thank you.  The official email provided by the organization does include all advisory non voting members in the email group.  Some are not using the official email and selecting only voting members.  It leaves the advisory members out of the loop and creates problems for the general governing board since they are not allowed to advise.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, Georgia Bulldawg 983 said:

Should all board correspondence include the advisory non voting members of the committee in email chains, especially since the committees sometimes have email votes?

If you are asking, "What does Robert's Rules of Order say about emails?", the answer is zilch.

You violate no parliamentary rule when party A excludes party B in any letter, email, telegram, text, etc., to parties C, D, E, and so on.

There is no quorum involved. There is no meeting involved. There is no previous notice involved.

So no parliamentary rule is involved.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/23/2017 at 4:44 PM, Georgia Bulldawg 983 said:

Should all board correspondence include the advisory non voting members of the committee in email chains, especially since the committees sometimes have email votes?

On 6/24/2017 at 11:05 AM, Kim Goldsworthy said:

If you are asking, "What does Robert's Rules of Order say about emails?", the answer is zilch.

You violate no parliamentary rule when party A excludes party B in any letter, email, telegram, text, etc., to parties C, D, E, and so on.

There is no quorum involved. There is no meeting involved. There is no previous notice involved.

So no parliamentary rule is involved.

Well, I think voting by e-mail would involve (and violate) one.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...