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Constitutions and internal policies for The Flux Movement - EDIT ACCESS IS RESTRICTED
https://voteflux.org
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AGM dates #40

Open quickdry opened 4 years ago

quickdry commented 4 years ago

Just thought I'd add a few notes as I read through the constitution (because I'm a super-fun-on-the-weekends-kinda-guy) and hope they're received in the spirit of 'trying to help improve things' in which they're given. I didn't submit this as a pull request because that would need some concrete changes, I'm just putting this up for discussion.

Annual General Meetings

The party is required to announce the date of the Annual General Meeting (AGM) once per calendar year at a time of the Leadership's choosing, and hold the AGM within one month of the announcement.

An AGM is to be chaired by the secretary and follow an agenda. The agenda is open for any member to add an item. Members will be notified by email at least 1 week before the AGM. The Leadership is required to be present where possible, and the meeting will be live-streamed to members. Members may request to be invited to the AGM. Only members who are invited by the Leadership may participate. The AGM does not have to occur in one physical place; an online AGM is okay.

This doesn't provide any minimum level of notice for an AGM to members, nor the timeframes for when agenda items are finalised and can no longer be added - consider this scenario: the leadership decides to have an AGM on January 20. On January 1st they announce the agenda is open, on January 4th the agenda is declared closed and sent to members. This satisfies the constitutional requirement to notify "at least 1 week before the AGM" but does not tell members what the date is, all the know is that it will happen in 1 week or more - it could be December 15th AGM for all they know. On January 20th at 10:00am the Leadership announce the AGM will be occurring at January 20th 10:05am - this satisfies the "hold within 1 month" requirement.

Ultimately the structure makes the AGM somewhat meaningless since at any point in time it could be shut down by The Leader, and regardless of what agenda items are proposed, the only voting/discussion is done by the leadership and even those decisions are at the grace of The Leader.

Maybe something like

"The party is required to hold an AGM once per calendar year, the date, time and location must be announced to the membership by email and on the website at least 28 days prior to the meeting being held. Agenda items may be added by members up till 4PM AEST 14 days prior to the AGM commencement. Members will be notified by email of the final AGM agenda 7 days prior to the AGM commencement."

Decision Making - these seem like they're intended as "OR" conditions, perhaps this would be clearer:

  1. The Leader is present, or
  2. The Deputy Leader and one other member of the Leadership is present, or
  3. Three members of the Leadership are present

Amendments to the constitution - the 66% quorum seems irrelevant as at any time it can be changed by the Leader.

I understand the argument behind the "benevolent dictator" setup to avoid hijacking, but ultimately if elected, a "good Flux Parliamentarian" is supposed to be voting on bills in accordance with the member's app voting, not their own wishes, so you could just launch a 51% attack through that avenue - in which case is it even proper to call it an attack when it is "voting in accordance with the memberships wishes" ... it just so happens that 51+% of the membership votes were also members of Major Party X directed to join Flux and vote a certain way - even if it was for some truly heinous violations against Australians such as an act to prevent Mr Whippy vans entering beachside carparks or display home centres.

I know there is the looming threat of a 51% attack, and I believe in the good intentions behind the constitution written, but as a set of rules it still reads as "we want democracy, and to get it, we're disconnecting the membership from any power in party leadership/governance". It gives the impression of "democracy" with a big asterisk attached.

I recall the articles making this critique in the media/wikipedia and think it makes sense to at least put in place a proper election process in the constitution even if it is set to take effect after the next federal election.

I'd also remove the names from the state party constitutions as they already reference the federal party constitution so it becomes a little redundant.

Lastly, I couldn't find anything about minutes of meetings, given the platform is about improving access to democracy and transparency of process, perhaps there should be an item requiring minutes of meetings to be published on the website for member access. Maybe that the last item prior to closing a meeting must be an acceptance of the meeting's minutes so they can be published immediately after.

BenBallingall commented 4 years ago

Fwiw; I agree in principle with everything you're saying and hope this discussion gets picked up.

Logistically from my own side, would love to get ideas on AGM set up, keeping the membership updated etc. Personally I think the membership seeing how the movement actually operates reasonably non-hierarchically, despite the pre-eminence of the term "leader", could aid us a lot in any transition towards a member run, member elected party leadership.

Being super Frank with you - we have like 20 donators and 10 active volunteers.

Give me enough volunteers that need to be lead by their own elected leader then it'll be time to set up the democratic election clause in the constitution. Right now, there's work to do. Lots of it.

Plz note I am not speaking as a member of leadership - just my $0.02

XertroV commented 4 years ago

Just thought I'd add a few notes as I read through the constitution (because I'm a super-fun-on-the-weekends-kinda-guy) and hope they're received in the spirit of 'trying to help improve things' in which they're given. I didn't submit this as a pull request because that would need some concrete changes, I'm just putting this up for discussion.

Hey @quickdry. Discussion is always welcome. Good idea re PR. Also any changes we can make are easier to deal with piecemeal, so best to avoid big PRs touching multiple things, I recon.

I'm just replying as I go through this, FYI, going to try and avoid the need for coming back to edit.

Annual General Meetings

The party is required to announce the date of the Annual General Meeting (AGM) once per calendar year at a time of the Leadership's choosing, and hold the AGM within one month of the announcement. An AGM is to be chaired by the secretary and follow an agenda. The agenda is open for any member to add an item. Members will be notified by email at least 1 week before the AGM. The Leadership is required to be present where possible, and the meeting will be live-streamed to members. Members may request to be invited to the AGM. Only members who are invited by the Leadership may participate. The AGM does not have to occur in one physical place; an online AGM is okay.

This doesn't provide any minimum level of notice for an AGM to members

It currently says:

Members will be notified by email at least 1 week before the AGM

Continuing:

nor the timeframes for when agenda items are finalised and can no longer be added - consider this scenario: the leadership decides to have an AGM on January 20. On January 1st they announce the agenda is open, on January 4th the agenda is declared closed and sent to members. This satisfies the constitutional requirement to notify "at least 1 week before the AGM" but does not tell members what the date is,

Ah, the nor conjunction threw me. I see what you meant.

all the know is that it will happen in 1 week or more - it could be December 15th AGM for all they know.

Strike my previous sentence.

I think it is reasonable to presume Members will be notified by email at least 1 week before the AGM includes the implied [of the AGM's date]. However, I could write this more clearly now (than I did then).

On January 20th at 10:00am the Leadership announce the AGM will be occurring at January 20th 10:05am - this satisfies the "hold within 1 month" requirement.

But violates Members will be notified by email at least 1 week before the AGM. Any ambiguity can be fixed while fixing the clarity thing above.

Ultimately the structure makes the AGM somewhat meaningless since at any point in time it could be shut down by The Leader, and regardless of what agenda items are proposed, the only voting/discussion is done by the leadership and even those decisions are at the grace of The Leader.

Sure it can, that's fine. I suspect we have a different idea of the problem the AGM is solving - the reason it exists. Most important issues are dealt with far before the AGM (I don't think we've ever solved an issue at an AGM, though one of them was like 6 hrs long; I could easily be forgetting something). If we didn't deal with important issues before the AGM that'd be a bigger problem.

Maybe something like

"The party is required to hold an AGM once per calendar year, the date, time and location must be announced to the membership by email and on the website at least 28 days prior to the meeting being held. Agenda items may be added by members up till 4PM AEST 14 days prior to the AGM commencement. Members will be notified by email of the final AGM agenda 7 days prior to the AGM commencement."

Some points here are good, but we have the wording we have b/c the AGM hasn't been especially important and it's not something we've been particularly proactive about.

You might find our first AGM a fun bit of history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-SNt-KIRHE

Here's the long one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r743gh0ZohE

(the 2019 one was considerably shorter)

You should also keep in mind the limits set out in the AGM are not the policy or procedures applied at any particular AGM. The limits are constraints on our (the Leadership's) behaviour, not the procedure we use. Limits should be much more flexible than any particular policy.

Decision Making - these seem like they're intended as "OR" conditions, perhaps this would be clearer:

  1. The Leader is present, or
  2. The Deputy Leader and one other member of the Leadership is present, or
  3. Three members of the Leadership are present

Yes. There's also an implied hierarchy here, which is more explicit with numbers.

Also, please quote the original text where possible.

Amendments to the constitution - the 66% quorum seems irrelevant as at any time it can be changed by the Leader.

The quorum is there so that we can fix problems if the Leader isn't available.

I understand the argument behind the "benevolent dictator" setup to avoid hijacking, but ultimately if elected, a "good Flux Parliamentarian" is supposed to be voting on bills in accordance with the member's app voting, not their own wishes, so you could just launch a 51% attack through that avenue - in which case is it even proper to call it an attack when it is "voting in accordance with the memberships wishes" ... it just so happens that 51+% of the membership votes were also members of Major Party X directed to join Flux and vote a certain way - even if it was for some truly heinous violations against Australians such as an act to prevent Mr Whippy vans entering beachside carparks or display home centres.

I'm open to talking about this, but that paragraph was one long sentence. We're aware of the risk but I'm not sure the constitution is the right place to put a solution.

At least some of your quotes are not of any text in the constitution, which is ambiguous. (Particularly because benevolent dictator was in previous versions.)

I know there is the looming threat of a 51% attack, and I believe in the good intentions behind the constitution written, but as a set of rules it still reads as "we want democracy, and to get it, we're disconnecting the membership from any power in party leadership/governance". It gives the impression of "democracy" with a big asterisk attached.

Looming from where? And by what avenue?

The constitution is not the place to put down solutions to the problems you raise. The constitution is a tool to ensure the party can be run effectively.

These articles I wrote in 2017 have some problems with clarity, however, they do contain a lot of background I think you're missing.

  1. https://xk.io/2017/05/26/an-overview-of-flux-and-ibdd/
  2. https://xk.io/2017/05/27/ibdd-and-poppers-criterion/

I recall the articles making this critique in the media/wikipedia and think it makes sense to at least put in place a proper election process in the constitution even if it is set to take effect after the next federal election.

I'm prohibited from editing the wikipedia page, as is anyone connected to the party. For clarity: that's a general policy wikipedia has.

I don't think the wikipedia article is very good, and I don't know of anyone contacting us as part of their research before editing the article.

I'd also remove the names from the state party constitutions as they already reference the federal party constitution so it becomes a little redundant.

Can you quote or link the sections you're referring to?

It's currently difficult to view the source code of markdown files on github (so you can refer to line numbers / use permalinks). You can use the "blame" view (button at top), or this extension provides a toggle: refined github. Press 'y' to change the URL to a canonical/permalink URL, e.g. https://github.com/voteflux/flux/blame/4507eaade10f4572a23b84b3819a4afbc0420423/CONSTITUTION.md#L51

Lastly, I couldn't find anything about minutes of meetings, given the platform is about improving access to democracy and transparency of process, perhaps there should be an item requiring minutes of meetings to be published on the website for member access. Maybe that the last item prior to closing a meeting must be an acceptance of the meeting's minutes so they can be published immediately after.

Are you volunteering to do minutes?

WRT to the AGM at least, is the livestream not sufficient?

We tend not to have party meetings. We do have meetings on discord regularly tho.

Thanks for posting the discussion! I have two TODOs for myself out of this:

I will mention you in the PRs so you get a notification.

XertroV commented 4 years ago

@quickdry - see https://github.com/voteflux/flux/pull/41

XertroV commented 4 years ago

@quickdry - see #42 also

XertroV commented 4 years ago

Re quotations, please note the following in this repo's readme: (typo and all)

Also, in regards to discussion, please make liberal use of quoting since comments can be edited after the fact and to avoid ambiguety. Please do not be surprised if you are asked to make use of quotes in your discussion posts. Good quoting is incredibly important, and paraphrasing other people or misquoting them (deliberately or accidentally) is taken quite seriously.