[Businessmtg] "Participation" Discussion

[Rosemary Tokatlian]

I agree with each of the points except the first. I feel the requirement to
serve should be a minimum of six months participation in ASP.

Thank you,
Rose



On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 11:23 PM, Steve Rankin <steve at serenitysys.com>wrote:

> 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
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