Resolution 2007-01-16.iwj.5: Membership communication

This resolution was adopted by the Board of Directors of SPI at their meeting of February 16, 2007.

Whereas

1. SPI board members would like to be fully prepared and briefed by the time of the meeting, both to improve the quality of decisionmaking and to improve the efficiency of the meeting itself.

2. SPI members should be given reasonable notice of what business is to be transacted at board meetings, so that the membership can participate most fully in the discussion, and arrange to attend meetings which deal with subjects in which they have particular interest.

3. It is good practice to set a deadline for submission of new business, and to list the business to be conducted in meeting announcements.

4. The SPI Secretary has already made progress towards improving the mechanics of SPI Board meetings, in particular by establishing formal standards for proposing business for the meeting.

It is Resolved that

1. The SPI Secretary is requested to incorporate into those formal standards a timetable resembling this one:

    by T-10 days but not before T-14 days:
                 Announcement giving time and place of meeting and
                 instructions for getting items onto the agenda.
       T-7 days: Latest non-emergency agenda item submission deadline,
                 to be submitted in accordance with other instructions
                 from the Secretary.
                 Agenda items which are intended to result in a board
                 decision (ie nearly all of them) should come with a
                 draft resolution text to be considered.
      T-48hours: Agenda items which consist of reports to the board or to
                 the membership should come with the complete text of
                 the report as it is to be considered by the board.
    by T-5 days: Meeting reminder announcement, sent by email,
                 containing complete list of non-emergency business to
                 be conducted (NB, _containing_ not _linking to_;
                 however a reference to a specific email message sent
                 to a publicly archived SPI mailing list is sufficient).

where T is the time of any particular board meeting.