Keeping Up With the Times
I have for quite some time now, as the Bay Chapter Chair person, wanted to edit and clean up our Chapter membership list. I have had this on one of my bucket lists. Incidentally, another big one on the list was seeing my favorite musicians live (before they die) and they aren’t getting any younger.
I knew years ago that to undertake the membership list project would be a very long, hard, manually laborious task. Having knee surgery recently and not being able to do my usual activities helped me with this project. When you have to sit with your leg up for the better part of the day a person will go crazy without something to do.
CCTA By-law Addendums
At our CCTA summer executive meeting in Sacramento, one of the items we were working on was the modernization of our by-laws. We realized a few years that they were somewhat out-dated and that left the association open for unwanted discourse that could be become serious. With advice and help from counsel we updated the by-laws two years ago. We most recently added the “Subdivisions” section and we are now refining the last section “Chapters” .
We ran into a bird’s nest of issues, you know the kind you get in your spinning reel when you screw up a cast and have to sit on the river bank for hours trying to untangle it. It seemed that we had more issues when we finished up then when we started.
This is the 21st Century
A real big problem with all associations, is getting people to meetings. We are spread out geographically, time is short, information is quickly sent out via e-mail, the magazine and websites have evolved into a real class acts; for these reasons it is almost impossible to get big attendance at meetings. We are supposed to have 50 percent of members at a meeting to reach a quorum, an impossible number to reach at a physical meeting for any association.
I came up with some ideas that I proposed to the Bay Chapter at a meeting on August 27th, so we would have the correct number of people to make the quorum count to legally vote on an issue under our new by-laws – e-mail voting, which the chapter approved.
Counsel says is an acceptable method of distribution of ballots as is written in the by-laws now. Ah, but wait you say what about the members that don’t have e-mail? We only had five out of 51 voting members that do not have an e-mail in our chapter. But they have smart phones with text and it is very simple to send an e-mail via text. They just reply back to the text and it goes right back to the sender as an e-mail. For those one or two that don’t text, a paper ballot will be mailed to them.
Another idea the chapter voted on and passed was to have our own “Bay Chapter” e-mail address. This way there is continuity in the delivery of e-mails to the chapter members and everyone will know it’s about chapter business and won’t be confused at a new chapter chair’s e-mail address.
Technology is here to stay and will no doubt evolve further. If we don’t jump on board this E-train we will be left in the dust. Hopefully what the Bay Chapter recently discussed, voted on, and passed, will help in the writing of addendums for the association by-laws moving us truly into the future. This is a work in progress and we will be fine tuning these ideas as we go along.Keeping Up With the Times
I have for quite some time now, as the Bay Chapter Chair person, wanted to edit and clean up our Chapter membership list. I have had this on one of my bucket lists. Incidentally, another big one on the list was seeing my favorite musicians live (before they die) and they aren’t getting any younger.
I knew years ago that to undertake the membership list project would be a very long, hard, manually laborious task. Having knee surgery recently and not being able to do my usual activities helped me with this project. When you have to sit with your leg up for the better part of the day a person will go crazy without something to do.
