Breck

1 hour ago, Josh Martin said:

Quotes below are Josh Martin's, still learning the interface, apologies. 

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A person chosen by the sponsors of the meeting calls the meeting to order. The first order of business is then to elect a presiding officer for the remainder of the meeting. Nominations are taken from the floor. A voice vote is taken on the nominees, in the order nominated, and the first person receiving a majority vote is elected.

 

 

 

Thanks, it makes sense. 

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Such “open-ended” thinking is generally left to the bylaws committee, which will be appointed at this meeting.

 

 

 

We ARE the bylaws committee and I anticipate procedural problems. It is a bunch of super smart academics with varied social skills, lovely people, but not the easiest bunch to work with. I may just cast it as a game, lots of them play D&D so they know how to play by rules. 

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Yes. The CD-ROM edition of RONR has some sample rules for video conferences.

That is super useful. Thanks. 

Breck

1 minute ago, Richard Brown said:

Breck, have you read Chapter XVII in RONR, "Mass Meetings and Organization of a Permanent Society" on pages 543=561?  It pretty much walks you through the process of starting a new organization.  Chapter 53 is "Mass Meetings" (which is usually your first meeting) and Chapter 54 is the actual process of organizing the new society.

If you do not have a copy of RONR, I suggest you get a copy as it has extremely useful information for starting a new organization.   It's only about $12.50 or so from Amazon, about $18 in bookstores.  Another book which is helpful in this regard is "Robert's Rules for Dummies" by C. Alan Jennings.  It is currently in its third edition.

Thank you Richard for the quick reply. I was in the process of ordering those exact books and will read relevant sections. 

Breck

Hello all,

   I am starting a committee and feel that we should do it "by the book", the book being RONR. I will use RONR authority language for Meeting of a Group That Does Not Yet Have Bylaws:

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“Resolved, That the rules contained in the current edition of Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised shall govern this meeting in all cases to which they are applicable and in which they are not inconsistent with any special rules of order the meeting may adopt.”

We have no special rules yet. 

My first question is how we run the first meeting. Items of concern are:

1) How to decide a presiding officer (PO)/chair? I have searched extensively and cannot find how to boot strap that decision--it could be contentious believe it or not. 

2) Should I hire a professional parliamentarian PO to start things off on the correct foot? How does one find one and what are typical costs? 

3) We have some very open ended thinking to do--essentially the committee is formed to create bylaws for governance for an open source software project. How best to have some non-decision making discussion to start the process of determining our bylaws. I am inclined to "borrow/steal" from existing organizations like the Apache foundation but we still need to have a discussion to research the possibilities. Does this all happen under "New Business". It would be awkward have the PO recognize individual comments. Maybe all the "open ended" thinking happens outside the scope of the meeting.

4) We are geographically distributed so will be doing meetings via video conference. Are there any special considerations given that format?

5) What is the best intro to RONR out there? There is a Dummies book, obviously the book itself but that is too daunting as a primer. 

I tried hard to answer 1) on my own but no luck, 2-5) I got lazy and tacked them on since I have your attention. 

thanks

Breck