[Ground-station] AMSAT "Don't Rock the Boat" rule

[Michelle Thompson]

Understood. ORI board is currently in session and I'll ask them to help
write something on paper and find a stamp and send it to all the addresses
listed.

Here's some background. There was a bylaws committee. Ironically, I'm the
one that made the motion to establish it. The committee was tasked with
fixing the electronic voting "problem", in that the wording of the bylaws
was kind of not great and needed to be modernized.

Those bylaws revisions, from that committee, were accompanied by a nice
report from Brennan Price (the secretary at the time) explaining the rules
changes. Those bylaws are not the ones that appeared for a short-notice
vote this past March. Those original bylaws revisions were skipped over.

Instead, these "Don't Rock the Boat" rules, along with the 3 year
membership requirement to run for the board, were substituted in the week
prior. There was no accompanying explanation or writeup.

There are no regular board meetings at AMSAT. They are only ad-hoc meetings
like this.

Choosing members is what this is about. There's no definition of
"undesirable", there's no procedure here, and there's no hearing, or
appeal, or any of the other mechanisms that exist in every other club or
organization bylaws that I'm aware of. This is subjective as written.
There's ways to write membership removal rules.

The "3 year minimum membership to run for the board" rule works in here
because once your membership is interrupted, then the clock starts over and
you can't run for 3 more years.

There isn't any reason to require a 3 year membership to run for the board.
The vast majority of people that have run recently are life members or
long-serving. Honestly, I think it would help the board to have recent
members elected.

I objected to these bylaws being substituted in instead of what I
considered to be the authentic committee work. I pointed out that without
standards/cause, a process, and an appeal that these rules were way too
easily abused.

In order to stop this, according to Patrick Stoddard, 10% of the members
would have to object in writing. Without a coordinated campaign and
spending some money, I do not believe that enough members will clue in to
this in time.

I believe they'll "review" ORI's Member Society membership as soon as it
comes up. It is really sad to see things like this happen, but it's not
surprising given the other choices leadership has made since the Reno
Symposium.

We should object to these rules and be prepared to simply be eliminated as
a Member Society. Currently, senior leadership refuses to even list us in
the AMSAT Directory with the other Member Societies, has interfered with
presentations at AMSAT Symposium, and has interfered with our news
submissions to ANS Bulletin. I believe AMSAT should be holding up its end
of the bargain as the major advocacy organization in amateur satellite, and
actively helping us, supporting our work, and being fair and kind to our
volunteers. Most of which happen to also be AMSAT members. This bylaws
revision is not the right direction.

We need to stay focused on publishing good work and helping projects in our
space be successful. We offer no threat or harm to AMSAT. Our work directly
benefits AMSAT in a wide variety of ways. In the future, things may
improve. In the meantime, sending a paper letter objecting to the bylaws
would be a positive step.

Thank you for bringing this up, Bruce. If you have any specific advice on
constructive wording and instructions on exactly what the "right" address
is, to avoid any misdirected mail, then that might be helpful to those
reading.

-Michelle W5NYV




On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 4:49 PM Bruce Perens via Ground-Station
<ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:

> ORI is an AMSAT member organization, and I submit that ORI should file a
> written objection to the proposed AMSAT "Don't Rock the Boat" rule.
>
>
> Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com>
> 4:44 PM (1 minute ago)
> to AMSAT
> The proposed modifications to the bylaws of AMSAT include a provision for
> the secretary and the board members to deny membership renewal to any
> member or member society. This is included in Article 1, Section 2. The new
> rule is:
>
> Section 2. Applications for membership or renewal as Member or Member
> Society shall be submitted to and in the manner prescribed by the
> Secretary. *In the case of any applicant whose character, reputation, or
> conduct might make him or her an undesirable member, the Secretary shall
> refer the application to the Board of Directors (the "Board") for review;
> in all other cases, the Secretary shall have the authority to grant
> membership.*
>
> Obviously, this is aimed at the folks who dared to challenge the board
> (and win) in a democratic election, and of course me, for daring to
> campaign for them. It is a fact that many non-profit boards have never
> learned about the fact that there *should* be contentious elections -
> that's what democracy is about. They just see them as a threat. So, here's
> a rather undemocratic rule which allows them to purge opposition, so that
> they will not be able to vote in the next election.
>
> Because the board doesn't want you to interfere with their addition of
> this rule, they have required that you register any objection to this, and
> other new rules, by writing a letter on paper and mailing it with a stamp.
> Objections you post to this list and the AMSAT BBS are useful for
> discussion and I encourage you to do so, but the board will not count them.
>
> --
> uce Perens - Board Partner, OSS Capital LLC Venture Capital
>
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