Joshua Katz

No, the rules requiring meetings to be in-person unless otherwise specified in the bylaws cannot be suspended.

It might also be worth amending the bylaws to conform with RONR's suggestion that the time not be set in the bylaws, so that it can be more easily changed in such a circumstance.

This is sometimes the best selling point for parliamentary procedure. People might not care about rights, but if you say you can get all the business done quickly...

It depends on how they got on the board. How are your board members and other officers chosen?

Yes. If you tell people we're going to conduct business about X, they might decide, well, I don't care about X, but if they were doing Y you bet I'd show up. If you then do Y...

The Secretary should call the meeting to order, and the body should then elect a chair pro tem.

What do you mean by verbatim minutes? Agreeing with the above answers, minutes are not a transcript of a meeting. They should already be simplified in that they include, for instance, no discussion, only what was done.

In my view, the motion failed to carry, and that historical fact cannot be changed. It is too late to reconsider, so the motion can simply be made anew - i.e. move at a meeting to appoint this individual after the rule has been changed.

Suppose an organization decides it really values stability, and says it takes a 99% vote to remove officers. If this theory about the vote threshold were correct, that would allow it, by making the wrong motion, to instead remove an officer with a 1% vote.

Yes, unless the organization's rules say otherwise.

Your interpretation amounts to a 1/3 vote threshold for removal from the board. Given that, why would anyone ever move to remove an officer? They should just always move to keep him, which makes it far easier to remove than by making the correct motion. Why do the bylaws say they need a 2/3 vote if there's a trick for doing it with a minority vote? (Obviously, because there isn't, I'm just saying.)

No. First of all, nothing you've mentioned contains a requirement for a 2/3 vote to keep someone on the board. What you've told us is that, in essence, anything more than 1/3 can keep them on the board. So why would you think that, if the chair mistakenly allowed a motion to keep someone on the board, the threshold for adoption would be 2/3?

What set of rules do you think will work better? Any rules in which an organization can be shut down by heckling from non-members strikes me as non-ideal, and infinitely vetoable, the flip side of despotism. RONR, by contrast, prevents that, but works to protect the rights of members against, say, chair despotism. It sounds like what you actually dislike is the relationship between a board and the entity it governs. That relationship is closer to "despotic" in other contexts, such as corporate law. But when the rules in RONR apply, that relationship exists because the membership made

Additionally, in my view, to the extent they are rights, they are not conferred by RONR.

No. For that matter, my position is that it does not confer any rights on members. It recognizes and protects existing rights. And outside entities may choose to treat its requirements as binding in other contexts, but that's their decision, not something arising from the rules in RONR. And to protect the body itself. No. The unexecuted portion can, yes. Whether they can sue for breach under an estoppel theory is a question unrelated to RONR. Note that the above answers are about RONR. If a court or entity reads it as obligatory that a body follow RONR, then that d