Difference between revisions of "Bylaws Rewrite/2009"

Revision as of 13:28, 13 April 2018

Previous effort to rewrite Bylaws in 2009 (archived)

Goals

1. Cut down on the number of elected positions. We currently have 2 vice president positions and 15 board member positions
2. Specify the elections shall happen once a year, instead of every 2 years
3. Remove section on committees. We don't need standing committees, and it is implicit in the power granted to the officers that they can create committees and working groups at will
4. Voting clarification: Currently the bylaws say "The manner of election shall be determined by the Executive Committee or any other committee duly designated or organized for such purpose and communicated in writing to all members." I believe the election procedures should be written more clearly in the Bylaws
5. We need to clarify what the membership requirements are. The current bylaws state the members must be members of ISOC, but ISOC no longer has the paid individual membership that it had at the time our bylaws were first written.
6. For the past few years we've had the convention that the Secretary is the ISOC chapter voting representative (to submit our chapter vote when voting for the ISOC board). The new bylaws should codify this, and establish how we decide what vote we will cast.

Other issues to be resolved

1. From time to time the issue of what constitutes a quorum comes up. Other organizations have bylaws that say things like "a majority of the board" but we've always had the tradition that business is always voted on by all members present at the meeting
2. We need some financial controls. Other organizations have audit committees. We seem to be too small (and have too small a budget) to bother with an audit committee, but we should have some procedure about approval of disbursement (and we should definitely disallow signing of blank checks).
3. Do we need to specify that ISOC-NY shall obey all state and federal laws pertaining to non-profits, or is that implied?

Procedure

All members should feel free to comment the bylaws rewrite on the Discuss list

The current bylaws state that "All proposed changes to these Chapter Bylaws shall have been approved by ISOC-International's Vice President of Chapters before being presented to the Chapter membership for a vote." The position of Vice President of Chapters does not exist anymore. Proposed changes must be submitted to the ISOC Membership Team (chapters AT isoc.org)

Resources

• ISOC Chapter bylaws template
• How to Write Non-profit Bylaws
• samples of nonprofit bylaws

Google Docs

• ISOC-NY Bylaws
• ISOC Model Bylaws