[Mikkel Paulson]

I've met a couple of times with Nuitari and Daniel over the past few days, and a concern that we share is that too many trivial questions are being put to general meetings, lengthening them needlessly and forcing us to defer pressing issues until a monthly meeting rather than dealing with them immediately.

Therefore, I suggest that most decision-making take place at weekly meetings of the Federal Council, voted on by the elected Directors. If the members disagree with a decision of the Directors, they then have the power to reverse the decision at the next general meeting. This allows us to act swiftly without compromising our members' right to directly determine the future of their party.

Of course, this should wait until after the election on August 19th to ensure that the Directors making decisions in this regard have a real mandate.

As well, in the medium term, I'd like to look at implementing a community-based voting system. Basically, the idea is that community motions are posted to a web page for other members to vote up or down. The two or three motions with the highest score each month are then voted on at the next general meeting, in addition to administrative matters introduced by Directors or required under the constitution.

[Sean Hunt]

On the one hand, simplification is good, but on the other hand, as someone who doesn't want to make the commitment to be a Director but does still want to be engaged in the process, general meetings are the primary formal procedure I have to participate in formal party affairs (as opposed to volunteer work and such). That said, I've only attended one, and that only had four motions - maybe there's more cruft in other ones. If four motions is considered to be too much cruft, then we'll have a lot of issues as we come to candidacies and platform matters, which I feel should be resolved by the general membership if at all possible.

There doesn't seem to be much of a formal distribution of powers anywhere, but definitely most administrative decisions should be left to the Council - that is their job. I also agree that a general meeting should have override capability. We could also cut the cruft by having motions posted beforehand in their own forums and debated there, so as to reduce the amount of debate time necessary at meetings - we could also add a proxy/designate system so that someone could formally post a vote to the forum and have it automatically cast by proxy.

[Thomas]

Are we in a rush or something?  Why don't we just have more meetings to prevent lengthy ones?

[Sean Hunt]

Are we in a rush or something?  Why don't we just have more meetings to prevent lengthy ones?

Once a month is already pretty frequent as it is.

[Mikkel Paulson]

Are we in a rush or something?  Why don't we just have more meetings to prevent lengthy ones?

Sometimes? Very much so.

Once a month is already pretty frequent as it is.

The US Pirate Party has weekly general meetings and is in most other respects less developed and coordinated. I certainly wouldn't call once a month excessive by any stretch of the imagination.

[Ayes]

I fall on the side of more, specific meetings. More power to less people = bad idea. More votes, discussion periods, etc.

a biweekly general meeting and a monthly promotions meeting could handle the load, for now. And after that, in the future, we could look to expand/contract based on party demand.

Maybe we should also have a scheduled time once a week to have members of the party informally meet in chat to discuss and debate party issues, could help get people really talking to one another about stuff.

[Thomas]

The girlscouts meet more often than us