[New-imc] Membership/decision making criteria, Tallahassee

[Dubravko Kakarigi]

Hello all:

We here in Tallahassee are marching on towards the point when we are ready 
with our application package. Currently we have been trying to figure out 
who should have the right, responsibility, and privilege to vote in various 
organizational forms we are setting up. The most general form is the 
Collective. There are two opinions: (1) only members of working groups will 
vote and (2) anyone attending the meeting of the Collective can vote after 
having attended certain number of previous meetings of the Collective (the 
meetings of the Collective are open to the public). Both of those opinions 
have merit. We are concerned with the implication of the IMC principle #7 
which we had already agreed to support:

"All IMCs recognize that a prerequisite for participation in the decision 
making process of each local group is the contribution of an individual's 
labor to the group"

A person "works" in our IMC by participating in a working group. It should 
seem that opinion #2 above would therefore violate the principle stated 
above, wouldn't it?

On the other hand, we looked at one of the recently accepted applications 
(Springfield, what a great and comprehensive application that was, we are 
using many of their ideas, very good work, IMHO) to see how that question 
was treated. To our surprise, it seems that Springfield allows anyone to 
vote, regardless of "the contribution of an individual's labor to the 
group." Did we misread their application?

More specifically, the page at 
http://www.springfieldimc.org/imcspringfield/policy.htm says in the part 
titled "SPOKES COUNCIL MEETING OPERATION:"

b. Meetings are open to the public.
c. All Spokes Council meeting attendees, not just empowered spokes, will 
have equal standing in decision making

And we saw no comments about this during the review process, Springfield 
has been accepted (I would have voted for acceptance too if I were asked).

We believe that either of the two approaches have merit, as I stated above, 
but the membership/association criteria are also important for us.

Your thoughts please...

...thanks


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DUBRAVKO KAKARIGI, P.O. Box 1742, Tallahassee, Florida 32302
    850-222-2211 (H&W)  http://www.kakarigi.net/dubravko/
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