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Special Interest Groups
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SBAY.ORG MembersThe list on this page shows the membership of the South Bay Community Network, Inc., also known by its domain name "sbay.org", a California non-profit corporation based in Silicon Valley. sbay.org serves as an umbrella for communications-related technical groups and forums. It's all about creating and maintaining community.On this page...
The purpose of membership
Membership in the corporation is for those involved in the
community-building and supporting roles that the
corporation serves to the projects and groups which are
organized under its umbrella.
It actually isn't necessary to be a member of
the corporation to participate in any projects or attend forums.
One scenario where a participant might choose to seek membership is when they're involved in one of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and take an interest in the wider community that the corporation serves. This becomes more likely when someone participates in more than one SIG. Another scenario is if anyone seeks a position as an officer of a SIG. In order to maintain a sufficiently strong organizational link for the Volunteer Protection Act of 1997 to apply to the SIGs, we must require that officers of SIGs are members of the corporation. For the same reason, the leader of each SIG is also given a non-voting seat on the Board of Directors if they weren't already elected to a voting seat. Becoming a memberMembership in the corporation is a privilege earned through participation. A potential new member may be nominated by any one of the following:
List of membersThe members of the corporation are as shown in the table below.
Other organizations which use the "meritocracy" membership modelA "meritocracy" means governing by those who have made accomplishments. This membership structure was loosely based on that of the Apache Software Foundation. ASF also serves as an umbrella for volunteer projects. Though there are plenty of differences in the organizations, there were many times during the writing of our corporate By-Laws that it was observed we were trying to solve problems ASF had already dealt with. At those times we considered what was applicable to our organization. It's fair to credit ASF for the ideas and give a tip of the hat for the nice work.Voting status of membersIn some relatively rare circumstances, such as amending the By-Laws, a 2/3 vote of all the members is required.We wanted to try to prevent situations where less than 2/3 of the votes are available to be cast, making such a vote impossible. During the discussions about the new meritocracy membership system, there were some ideas about having voting privileges expire and have members re-qualify for them. But that's not at all consistent with the kind of organization we've been or want to be. That idea didn't get far. Though it was a step along the way to better ideas. It's unavoidable in any volunteer organization that people have cycles in which they have more or less time available. So we wanted to allow members to put up the figurative "do not disturb sign" when they need to, and then not be pestered to help reach a 2/3 vote. But we needed the system to be open for members to return to active status, which is consistent with the all-volunteer nature of our organization. So the system we arrived at is simply to allow members to decide for themselves whether they're currently able to be active. Each member may declare that they are "active" or "inactive" for voting. These declarations may be made any time, including just in time for a vote. A declaration of active voting status is good for 12 months. |
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The South Bay Community Network, Inc.
a 501(c)3 tax-exempt California non-profit corporation |
Wed 2-Jan-2008 | <webmaster@sbay.org> |