Constitution

[Lid]

Oh, Deputy Convenor will now chair Board in absence of the Convenor, and will be directly elected by the BoT at their first meeting of the term of office, too.

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We are not drunks, we are multi-millionaires

[Eliot Wilson]

I quite agree with Mr Stewart. Informal delegation is perfectly reasonable. As it happens, Miss Weigler, when Convenor, delegated to me the organisation of LPH debates, with, I like immodestly to think, some degree of success - and I wasn't even on the Board. It worked well, but didn't need formalising in the Constitution, and, at the end of the day, she was formally responsible for the whole shebang.

[hr]

Bill and Ted beat the Grim Reaper at Twister

Bill: "You played very well, Death, especially with your totally heavy Death robes."

Death: "Don't patronise me."

[RobFett]

The idea of a deputy convenor sounds great but I'm not sure about the role of the Internal Secretary. For the sake of accountability and the smooth running of LPH one person and one person only should be responsible for organising it. It is somewhat ludicrous to suggest that one person would choose the motion and another to find speakers when inevitably the two things are dependant on each other.

An argument I've heard from a member of the board is that the student body should be able to elect a good manager (to keep the society running smoothly) and the active members should should pick someone as internal secretary who they know has the contacts to get hold of speakers. This could potentially work (as long as the internal secretary would be SOLELY responsible for organising THE WHOLE of LPH) but I'm not sure that it will would leave the Convenor with much of a job....

Am I right in thinking that Lid thinks SAB wouldn't veto the changes? If so I would ask him to think again.

[Lid]

The problem as I see it, Rob, is that the Convenor has their head on the block, in terms of the electorate putting them there. If the Convenor doesn't like things done the way they are by the Internal Secretary, then there's not much they can do about it.

There was a lot of arguing about the exact phraseology, but I was one of those that supported changing the wording to "assist" the Convenor, as that would allow the convenor to formally delegate, but allow the convenor to delegate how much power he or she wanted. (I do have to side with Mr Wilson here in that these things needn't necessarily be legislated).

If you have personal concerns, Rob, I'm still of the belief that SSC would be the correct place to bring these up, it's just with having the SSC Senior Officer and the DoSDA on the committee that agreed the changes and on SAB, things may get a bit convoluted, and it could be easier to bring it up with SSC (perhaps at the Joint Meeting) than try to force a veto from SAB. You could always, of course, just bring your concerns up with Rachael in person.

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We are not drunks, we are multi-millionaires

[exnihilo]

Tut, exactly what I warned against at the start of this thread. Not everything needs to be formalised in a constitution, especially that which reflects the practice of ONE board and not necessarily in any way how subsequent ones will want to operate. Ho hum.

[Lid]

Ten slices of that Humble Pie should go around, Dr Joss

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We are not drunks, we are multi-millionaires

[David Bean]

First of all, let me say that Court can't veto changes to the Laws, because only changes to the (SA) Constitution goes in front of them. That was something I clarified in my rewrite of earlier this year. Secondly, Rob, SAB is hardly likely to be the place to veto anything, given the large number of non-student members who frankly have no clue about these things, and just assume that the committees below them knew what they were talking about.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that the wording has been changed to 'assist' - Lid et al. did a good job on that one. I still don't see why anyone on the BoT thought it would be a good idea to hamstring future convenors as they were suggesting, but it looks like that particular problem has been avoided, and I'd have no problem with an assistance role (in fact it would probably have helped me immensely).

The issue of the deputy convenor, however, was something I forgot to mention earlier, and I also had problems with. I there when we introduced it as a carve-up position, and we deliberately avoided the measures that have just been introduced for a couple of considered reasons.

Firstly, we wanted to avoid the position becomming too political. The position was envisaged to be nothing more than a, if the convener falls very ill, goes mad or dies, this is who will step in. Fine. But we didn't want it to be a potential focus for dissention - I can imagine an anti-the convenor camp on a BoT putting up their own candidate, who then starts waltzing around like the anti-convenor, and the next thing you know you've got a Vatican-style schism. We also didn't want to give the deputy an unfair advantage in the next general elections, allowing them to claim to be the natural successor based on what may have been a fluke result of a carve-up vote.

Secondly, I note that this change in the laws directly contradicts the Standing Orders of the House, which when I re-drafted them a couple of years ago I made sure that they specifically mandate the Convenor to choose whomever they wish to chair debates in their absence. In particular, this was because of a fairly longstanding tradition of allowing the Father of the House to chair one debate during their term (a tradition that neither of my two convenors saw fit to honour, much to my chagrin); if this tradition were to be continued now, it would be specifically contrary to the terms of the Constitution. Interestingly, if the Convenor did decide to violate this revised Constitution and put someone else in the chair, there would be no means for anyone in the House to challenge it with a point of order, because according to the Standing Orders the convenor would have acted perfectly correctly (though obviously the convenor could be censured in committee later on). By the way, what does the constitution now say about situations where neither the Convenor or the deputy is available to chair the debate?

So, essentially, you've amended the position of deputy convenor so that it runs contrary to the spirit in which it was initially intended, harmony on the Board, tradition and democracy in the Society and the Standing Orders of the House. Again I ask someone from the Board - anyone, please - why on earth you thought this was a good idea?

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Psalm 91:7

[Lid]

The Deputy Convenor will chair board in the absence of the Convenor. Debates are still chaired by whoever the convenor wishes.

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We are not drunks, we are multi-millionaires

[David Bean]

Ah, I see. That's not what was described to me previously - was there a change n the meeting? I think it's a bit odd even so, because generally if the Convenor can't make a Board meeting they just reschedule it for some other time, but at least it won't destroy the world!

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Psalm 91:7

[ChrisH]

Firstly David you've managed to leap to the extreme end by implying we've somehow ended the world and brought damnation down upon ourselves.

The deputy convenor position is merely to clarify a position which frankly doesn't do anything at the moment into establishing who chair board meetings in the absence of the convenor. This is useful anyway but also more so given the option for the convenor to take on a more managerial position.
As for anti-convenor's and coronations, if the convenor never has to make use of the deputy (seeing as how Board only has to be every 2 weeks I can see that being very possible if the convenor did not want to give the deputy that opportunity) then they won't have any answer to 'what did you do as deputy?' If they were used then bully to them and they should be able to use that as a good example as to their ability to be convenor, presuming of course their period chairing the board went well.

As for the internal secretary role the wording put before the board was 'to assist' (I think it was finding rather than sourcing but that doesn't really matter), and that was accepted by everyone there. After Lee raised the issue of the scope of this it was pointed out that as the convenor is elected before the AGM it would be up to them to define what they felt the role would be for the coming year, presuming that candidates would speak to the convenor before seeking election so they knew what to expect.

As for the reason for the creation in the first place the board felt that a) champ sec was really a far too easy job (a view supported by the current and previous holders) and that b) formalising the assistance would be good.
Given the previous posters allusions to past or possible boards of horror with split decisions and anti-convenor surely it would be a good thing to have someone required to assist rather than being able to truthfully say they had upheld their remit by organising a few internal competitions.

Given that in recent years the frequency of LPH debates has increased and the number of outside speakers has increased (which I certainly view as a good thing) the workload for the convenor has increased and so we felt that there should be a means for the convenor to delegate some of that. Hence the internal secretary.

Oh yes, and we picked up on a couple of grammatical mistakes

Apologies for the long post but I wanted to clarify as much as possible.

[David Bean]

First of all I'd like to thank you for taking the time to respond to these messages; as I've said before, the intention was to introduce some alternative perspectives based on the years of experience in the Society that those former members who posted have gone through, not to criticise for the sake of it, and it's good for the Board to consider these views whenever possible. Feedback, as I'm led to believe one of the KPMG corporate slogans runs, is a gift.

As I said, I have no quarrel with the idea that an internal secretary should be mandated to assist with sourcing speakers with the assent of the Convenor; it was the idea that this job should be assumed by someone aside from the Convenor entirely that was giving me chest pains. I'd agree with you about the position of Championship Secretary being a bit of a non-job, too. I've never been entirely sure why we brought that back as-is; I think it was because the position of IV Secretary (which had the ChampSec's remit included for about two years) was simply far too big, and there wasn't anything else we felt like consolidating internal competitions with. I'm surprised it didn't get stuck with the Serjeant-at-Arms at some stage - just about everything else has!

Anyway, I'm still not clear as to why the Board imagined that a Convenor would be calling Board meetings and then neglecting to show up, but that's a minor issue. Also, I wouldn't say that the number of internal debates and external speakers has increased, either. Not in the sense of a general trend, anyway - it's been pretty much up to each Convenor to decide that on a yearly basis, although I'll grant you that Miranda's semi-year did see a sharp fall in the number of debates (by accident as well as design), and it took us a while to recover from that and other aspects of the year.

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Psalm 91:7