[svlug] ISSUE: SVLUG's continued status with SBAY

[Thomas G. Digby]

As my eyes glaze over from trying to follow this debate I'm reminded of a
Los Angeles science fiction club I was active in for roughly thirty years.  
They didn't have an email list but they did have paper-based equivalents.  
The more things change ...

But be that as it may, let's try to think in terms of functional pluses
and minuses and how we might engineer a solution.

Staying with SBAY may give SVLUG greater credibility in the eyes of
potential venue hosts and sponsors.  That's a plus for staying.

The SBAY corporate umbrella may (I am not a lawyer) shield SVLUG officers
and members from possible personal liability in the event of a mishap.  
That's an extremely unlikely possibility, but one that should nonetheless
be considered.  Another plus for staying.

The downside of staying is that SVLUG at least potentially gives up some
of its decision-making power.  Even if the present SBAY board members are
all reasonable people of good will there's still the chance some future
board may go bad.  That's a plus for going our separate ways.

But there may be a workaround for that problem.

Perhaps the to-be-written SVLUG charter could include a sort of
circuit-breaker provision:  If SBAY ever overrules SVLUG on some
non-trivial matter, or removes SVLUG officers against the will of the
SVLUG membership, it could trigger a provision by which the SVLUG members
could revolt by seceding from SBAY.

Secession should be difficult, perhaps requiring a super-majority vote at
a regular meeting or a majority vote at a string of consecutive meetings.  
But it should not be impossible.

(We may also need to include safeguards against someone playing games with
meeting scheduling in order to manipulate the votes.  But that kind of
thing is engineering detail I don't think I need to go into here.)

This idea isn't foolproof (nothing is), but it can probably be made good
enough for any reasonably foreseeable scenario.

Your thoughts?


-- 
                       -- Tom Digby
                       bubbles at well.com
                       http://www.well.com/~bubbles/