[Sosfbay-discuss] "Reboot the CC!" says Green uniTEA Nonaligned Movement; Proposal for GA from Bylaws Committee

[JamBoi]

Time to drink Green uniTEA: The Team Earth
Antifaction! ;-)

I speak for the vast majority of Greens that hate that
two factions have brought our party to its knees.  A
pox on both their houses! Yet all of us are to blame
also for letting this insanity drag on and on.  Now we
have an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start
over.  That's right, what do you do when an electronic
product fails?  Reboot!  Thankfully the Bylaws
Committee has prepared the following proposal for us
to start afresh with the CC.

The CC was always supposed to be a service
organization, not an executive function.  It has
ceased to serve ANY function.  Time to reboot!

Some have said 'why throw out the good apples with the
bad?'.  I say 'good apples??? Which good apples are
those?' - although I love these people as individuals,
as a collective they have utterly failed to serve
their function.  Time to reboot!

As John Morton <jlm108 at yahoo.com> said: "This party
belongs to not to the CC reps, not to the GA
delegates, not even to the 150,000 registered Greens
in CA.  It belongs to the hundreds of thousands, the
millions, who, if given the chance, would agree with
the 10 KV and commit to whatever degree to participate
in their propagation."  Time to reboot!

Drink Green uniTEA, not factional koolaid!

Drew Johnson
Santa Clara County delegate to the GA preparing to
vote for reboot!

TITLE: RESOLVING THE IMPASSE: 
RECONSTITUTING THE GPCA COORDINATING COMMITTEE

PRESENTERS: Mike Wyman (mswyman at comcast.net),
Marilyn Ditmanson (mditmanson at sbcglobal.net)

APPROVED BY: Green Party of Marin county council

BACKGROUND: 
The GPCA Coordinating Committee (CC) has been
deadlocked since October 2006. This is a result of an
ongoing conflict that goes back to 2001. Many hours of
meetings over the past 6 years have been rendered
useless due to infighting around "the LA situation,"
meaning which group from LA gets to vote on the CC.
Proposals of mediation and compromise have only
resulted in more infighting. The number of regions
with contested seats has instead increased to 4. The
result is that the CC is no longer able to perform its
main function of planning plenaries.

This proposal reconstitutes the CC with people who are
not and have not been involved in the party
infighting, much as a professional committee in the
business world will be reconstituted when unable to do
its work. It is
reconstituted with representation more proportionate
to
membership, as California has promoted in the national
party.

Part of the CC deadlock has been caused by the chaos
around the facilitation procedures for the CC. Using
supermajority voting thresholds for facilitation
decisions has resulted in the following situations:

* meetings being unable to be held at all, and no
items even discussed in the interest of
consensus-building, due to lack of 2/3 approval of an
agenda

* facilitators taking 45-minute stacks on whether to
add 5 minutes to an item
* long stretches of valuable meeting time wasted on
discussions of whether to add an item to the agenda,
alter the agenda or choose a new facilitator

* two different voting thresholds applying based
solely on whether the vote itself is taken online or
during a
teleconference, allowing proposals to be subject to
manipulations based on voting thresholds.

This proposal also clarifies basic facilitation
procedures for GPCA coordinating committee (CC)
meetings in order to avoid such situations. These
facilitation procedures are based on two main
premises:
1. The decision-making body has authority over its
agenda.
2. Basic facilitation decisions, such as agenda
approval, agenda amendment, and addition or
subtraction of discussion time, are not intended to
involve whole separate consensus processes and stacks
of clarifying questions, concerns and affirmations on
the facilitation decision. (Note that the facilitation
rules passed out at plenaries do not suggest this,
either.)

This proposal is a combination of a variety of ideas
for solving the CC's problems that have been brought
forward over recent months. The presenters hope that
adoption of this proposal will finally end the CC's
infighting based on historical animosities and give
the new CC a real opportunity to do its
bylaws-mandated job.

PROPOSAL: 
I.The General Assembly hereby reconstitutes the GPCA
Coordinating Committee (CC)

a.All seats on the CC are vacant as of 30 days from
the
passage of this proposal.

b.Per Paragraph 7-1.2 of the GPCA bylaws, the GA shall
allocate the 16 regional representative seats
proportionally to the Green Party membership in each
region. This calculation shall be performed by the
outgoing Liaison to the Secretary of State (Larry
Cafiero) according to the Method of Equal Proportions
described in the appendix to the GPCA bylaws.

c.All regions shall announce new elections to fill the
regional representative seats as soon as possible.
Regions must hold open, transparent elections with at
least 3 weeks notice distributed as widely as possible
in the region. Notice of upcoming regional
representative vacancies shall be posted to the county
contacts list as soon as possible after passage of
this proposal. Regions without alternate processes may
adopt temporary alternate processes for the purpose of
filling the seats in a timely manner.

d.No one who has served on the CC, or who has claimed
to serve on the CC, as representative or alternate,
over the course of the past 5 years, is eligible to
run for or fill any representative or alternate seat
on the CC for the next 2 years.

e.Transitional term lengths shall be varied in order
to
stagger the ending dates. This depends on the new
apportionment by the Liaison, but end dates of the
transitional terms would be expected to fall as
follows:

Even-Numbered Years
1 Emerald	January 2008
2 At-large 	spring GA 2008
1 San Francisco	May 2008
1 Silicon	June 2008
1 East Bay	July 2008
3 Los Angeles	November 2008
1 San Diego/Imperial	August 2008
1 ORSB	November 2008

Odd-Numbered Years
2 At-large	spring GA 2009
2 Central	May 2009
1 North Bay	May 2009
1 East Bay	July 2009
1 Monterey Bay	August 2009
1 Central Coast	August 2009
1 ORSB	November 2009

II.CC Facilitation Guidelines
GPCA CC meeting facilitation shall proceed according
to the following guidelines:

a.Proposals for CC meetings must be posted to the CC
listserv at least one week in advance of a scheduled
meeting.

b. CC meeting agendas shall be approved by the CC
prior to or at the beginning of a meeting, with a
simple majority threshold for approval. 

c. Changes in announced facilitation require a simple
majority threshold for approval.

d. Adding time to an agenda item or altering the
approved agenda requires a simple majority approval of
the CC. 

e. Adding a last minute item that was not submitted to
the CC list one week prior to the meeting requires a
2/3 threshold.

f. The CC prefers to discuss decision items on
teleconferences and at in-person meetings. If an item
is discussed at a meeting and scheduled for an online
vote, the threshold for that vote is the same as if
the vote had occurred during the meeting (2/3 for
regular meetings, 80% for a special meeting not
scheduled at a prior meeting at least a week in
advance). If an item goes to an online vote without
being discussed at a meeting, it has an 80% threshold.

g. Decisions may not be made after the regularly
scheduled adjournment time of the meeting unless a
majority (over half) decides to extend the call for a
specific amount of time. Decisions must then be made
within the time of the approved extension.

h. Simple majority approval votes on basic
facilitation
decisions can be done by asking quickly for "ayes" and
"nays," and only going to a roll call if approval is
unclear.

i. The new CC is requested to hire a Secretary to take
thorough minutes of meetings, post them to the CC
list,
amend them according to posted corrections, and post
the final version to both the CC listserv and the
archive of minutes. The new CC shall draft a job
description and hiring criteria for this position.

j. The new CC shall form a schedule of its basic tasks
that follow from the GPCA bylaws and integrate this
schedule with the 2-year GPCA work plan, when it is
adopted.

TIMELINE: 
Vacancies effective upon passage. Elections may take
place starting 2 weeks after passage of this proposal.
Elected CC members may meet on teleconferences but may
not make any decisions until a quorum of 14 is
achieved. 

RESOURCES:  Hiring a Secretary will require the CC
budgeting funds for this.


___________________

JamBoi: Jammy, The Sacred Cow Slayer
The Green Parties' #1 Blogger
http://dailyJam.blogspot.com

"To the brave belong all things"
Celt's invading Etrusca reply to nervous Romans around 400BC

"Live humbly, laugh often and love unconditionally" (anon)


 
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