At the Community Forum held during Spring 2017, a decision was made to separate the role of staff from the role of the Board. (In previous years, the staff and the Board were the same group of people.) Staff will now essentially function as a logistics group, tasked with planning for and putting on the conference on an annual basis. In contrast, the Board, which will have staggered multi-year terms, will be tasked with long-term vision and community-based decision-making, utilizing input from the community and from various committees and working groups.

Below is some relevant information that was presented by the Governance Committee and ratified by the community and the Board during the Spring 2017 conference:

We the Spring Community Form ratify the following operating procedure changes:

  1. The Board Members shall cease to run the actual conference, and instead shall create and oversee committees at its own discretion or at the behest of the Community Forum, and shall give those committees a specific charge at time of creation.
  2. The Board shall appoint a standing committee, referred to as staff, to run the actual conference using the current election process.
  3. The Board shall elect the next Board, with the understanding that Board members shall serve for at least two years and rotate out in such a way as to provide continuity.
  4. When any committee runs into something out of the scope of their charge, they shall inform the Board, who will deal with it appropriately.
  5. The board shall convene a Community Forum yearly at a conference
  6. The Community Forum shall select issues for discussion brought to it by the Board or by a community member, and the Board shall abide by decisions made at the forum.
  7. When the Board determines that an issue requires the input of or a decision by the greater Spring Community, the Board shall, when the Community Forum next convenes, present that issue to the forum.
  8. Board members may serve on various committees when practical and convenient.
  9. No committee shall have authority over any other committee. Any conflicts between committees shall be resolved by the Board.
  10. When the Board creates a committee, it shall create a liaison process between itself and that committee.
  11. Any committee created by the Board shall include at least one community member, with the recommendation that committees be comprised of at least 50% community members.

The Issue

There are a lot of decisions that need to get made in order for the Spring conference and community to exist. Every year, some of the members of the community volunteer to dedicate their time to help make those decisions and to work towards making this community and conference happen.

Though it’s not the only way to help, certainly the biggest volunteer time commitment is joining staff. However, dedicating a half dozen weekends or so over the course of the year and many hours outside of that doesn’t make staff’s opinions more important than other community member’s opinions, or mean that they are the only ones who can help and/or work to shape the conference. Lots of people who feel strongly about the community and who want to help can’t join staff for a large number of reasons.

A lot of the work of staff was originally intended to be for the very specific purpose of making logistical decisions – the organizational grunt work of running a weeklong event. In reality, however, an ever-increasing amount of staff’s time is being used to attempt to address a range of highly challenging, emotionally charged, community-wide social issues.

So there are two problems. First, the staff simply doesn’t have the time to handle all of the policy making and setting of community standards and priorities that is currently needed and wanted by the community. And secondly, major decisions about the whole community really need the input and buy-in of more than just the few who have the time to volunteer to organize the conference.

The solution we’ve come up with is to hold meetings to which the entire community is invited, to discuss issues and vote on actionable proposals. Although we have considered holding the meetings during the year, a major concern is that only a small percentage of the community would be able to attend, often only those who happen to live closest to the meeting location. It is also difficult for community members with children to attend meetings. Therefore, in order to include as broad a swath of the community as possible, we plan to hold at least one of these meetings at the conference itself.

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