[Businessmtg] "Participation" Discussion

Sun Apr 11 20:23:38 PDT 2010

Hi ASPers,

I'm going to respond with my take on some of the concerns that have been raised in the last couple of days, and then see if we have something like a consensus on the topic.  Since the server only understands plain text, I've used larger than normal paragraph breaks to try to make this easier to follow.  

1.  Only one persons stands for a position.  This has been the norm at ASP since the beginning.  There was only 1 exception during the first 10 years and one of the individuals had only been in ASP for a couple of weeks with no other experience in Al-Anon, so I asked her to come back after she'd been here a while longer and was familiar with ASP and our "small t" traditions.

2.  During my time as List Administrator, we didn't have elections because we never had more than one person make themselves available.  As a result, I simply gave the position to the first person that made themselves available.  

3.  Has ASP ever had problems with an officer?  Yes.  We have had several problems with officers.  The problems fall into 3 categories:

   3.a.  An officer abused their access to the server and harvested the list members for their personal agenda while I was traveling and offline for 2 weeks.  When I got back online and discovered the chaos the meeting was in, I figured out what was going on and removed that individual from the list per one of our founding policies-- tampering with the server is a capital offense.  

   3.b.  An officer of ASP with a long f2f service history (she was a Trustee to WSO at the time) performed the very basic duties of the job, but failed to participate in any of the business meetings during her tenure as officer.  

   3.c.  Several of the ASP Secretaries have had great difficulty serving as the Chair of the Business meeting.  Chairing this meeting is a huge challenge and many have responded to the difficulty by disappearing & leaving the meeting sort of high and dry until I stepped up and assumed the role of Chair.  BTW, when you are frustrated with the Secretary for the way she's handling this meeting, be grateful that she's doing as well as she is.  We are here to serve and to learn, not to be pros at our jobs.  

I'll note that I've seen all of these situations occur in f2f service.  Not only that, I'll say that I've seen these problem MORE often in f2f service than I've seen them in ASP.  

4.  An 'exit plan'.  How do we remove an officer if that becomes necessary?  If you refer to "The Founding Policies of A Serenity Place" #12 you will find . . . 

"Only the Steering Committee has 'jurisdiction' over issues of member/trusted servant behavior; the Steering Committee has the authority to unsubscribe individuals (or remove trusted servants from office) who somehow violate Group policy so that the Group needs them to leave . . ."

So, IMHO, we have a well established plan for dealing with officers that may need to be removed.

5.  Equal qualifications for all officers.  I understand Jerry's thinking--his noggin and mine are closely related!  But, this time I disagree with him.  First, both our Secretary and Greeter Chair are alternates to the List Administrator, hence they need to have similar basic qualifications.  So that's 3 out of 5 that need to meet the LA qualifications.  IMHO, the Treasurer is just as critical a position as the LA.  It didn't matter when ASP was hosted on my personal server for 10 years, but for the last 4 years ASP has needed money to function.  And in many ways, the Web Master is just as critical because it is our web site that serves as the foundation of ASP.  

It's easy to agree that the LA position is as important to ASP as the Delegate position is to an Area because an Area does NOT NEED a Delegate.  In fact, Al-Anon got along just fine for years without any Delegates.  But, ASP can't function without an LA.  Additionally, there is little that a Delegate can do that truly screws up an Area--most f2f meetings just ignore the Delegate anyway!  I've known many Delegates, but only a few that I thought did their jobs well.  But that is another story.

I'm OK with adding an additional layer to the LA qualifications, however, I'd prefer to keep it VERY simple.  My suggestion is that 

"A member of ASP must have served ASP in some other service capacity for 1 year in addition to any other minimum qualifications for ASP Officers."

This one year of service could be as a greeter, an ASP officer or ???  IMHO, serving ASP as a greeter is an excellent background for serving as an officer.  Both Dawn and Denise became LA after serving as greeters.

6.  Request for Name & email address.  I believe our resume form asks for this information.  Oops.  I was wrong.  It does ask for the name of the individual, but not the email address.  Perhaps we should modify the resume again to include the email address AND instead of simply saying 

   Name ____ perhaps we should say . . .

   Name _______ (real name, no pseudonyms or screen names)

7.  Regular participation in the Business Meeting.  IMHO, this is a no-brainer, but I guess it needs to be said outloud.

8.  Substantive unanimity in officer elections.  I just double-checked our Founding Guidelines and it states "Elections of trusted servants will adopt the election procedure as described in the 'Election of World Service Delegate' in the Al-Anon Service Manual, except that a majority vote will elect a trusted servant at A Serenity Place."

While I tend to agree with Jerry's suggestion that we have a 2/3's majority requirement, our Founding Guidelines stipulate a simple majority.  Since history has been kind to the Founding Guidelines, I'd suggest that we accept them as they are written until/unless we discover that we really NEED to change them.  

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, in summary, I'll offer the following points as what we are trying to reach a consensus on . . .

A.  Add the following requirement to the prerequisites to serving as an ASP officer:

"One year's participation in ASP is a prerequisite to serving as an officer of ASP.  Participation may take many forms, but merely having one's email address on the ASP server is not participation."

B.  Add the following to the resume form for ASP officer candidates:

"In what way do you feel you participate or contribute to the group?"

C.  Add the following requirement to the prerequisites for ASP List Administrator:

"A member of ASP must have served ASP in some other service capacity for 1 year in addition to any other minimum qualifications for ASP Officers."

D.  Change the following line in the resume form for ASP officer candidates:

    From . . .

     "Name __________"

    To  . . .

     "Name _______ (real name, no pseudonyms or screen names)
      Email Address _________"

------------------------------------------------------

OK.  That's enough from me tonight.  Please speak up on this so we can determine if we have a consensus or not.  I believe we are clear on points A & B, but points C & D are new, so we need y'all to chime in.

Finally, please note that there are other officer qualification issues on the agenda waiting to be discussed.  We're trying to keep this as simple as possible because discussing these things online is a PITA, so we are ONLY discussing facets of officer qualification that are related to each other at the same time.  Right now we're talking about time & participation in ASP requirements, nothing else.

Thanks for listening.

Hugs,
Steve