I do beleive that the voting should be public. Meeting minutes should also be published as soon as possible after the meetings. This will help all members to know what is going on behind the scenes.

Justin

Wow, Becky made me go and read the bylaws again! Of all the organizations I have been a part of, this is the first one I have seen where the meeting minutes of the BOD meetings are not made available to the general membership (along with the minutes of any general membership meetings). I went and looked at the bylaws of a couple other organizations I belong to, and the wording was similar to ours. Yet in both those cases, failure to publish the minutes (one uses a newsletter, one a website) would result in a full scale insurrection (and believe me, some of those church ladies are pretty tough!)

I am guessing that this passage was probably copied from some other organization’s bylaws, without a lot of thought. Can someone who was involved in the original drafting of the bylaws shed some light on this? Was the intent to not require the minutes be published, or was this just not a consideration at the time?

Yes, minutes of Board meetings should be published in a timely manner.

However, one of the problems is that the bulk of Board discussions and decisions occur in the private Board forum, not at in-person or virtual meetings. This makes it difficult to put together minutes or a recap of Board actions, because things are so scattered and the discussion jumps around and never really ends. Imagine trying to summarize everything that was posted in the Off-Topic forum in the past month in a concise yet meaningful way. 🙂 It’s a challenge.

Also, Board member votes on resolutions should be made public. I believe that having an electronic voting system for the Board is critical, because it would ensure all votes get recorded and would make it easy to publish the votes to the membership.

@Team Deejay wrote:

I am guessing that this passage was probably copied from some other organization’s bylaws, without a lot of thought. Can someone who was involved in the original drafting of the bylaws shed some light on this? Was the intent to not require the minutes be published, or was this just not a consideration at the time?

We examined the bylaws of several different organizations before selecting a base set that best matched what we wanted. Each article in the bylaws was discussed and modified as needed. We did not pull some generic bylaws out of a law book or off the Internet and rubber stamp them.

The intent of the bylaws was never to have the actions of the Board remain secret… it was assumed the secretary would publish the minutes. I remember typing up and posting minutes for Board meetings myself when I was secretary, and I know minutes were also made available by other Boards. For example:

Minutes from 2005 Board
Minutes from 2006 Board

It wouldn’t hurt to modify the bylaws to require that minutes be made available to the membership, just as summaries of the WGA’s finances are made available.