Ratify the (Initial) Constitution
Luke Agile
Public
Seen by 82
What is this thread?
This thread's purpose is to agree that the constitution outlined below is an accurate representation of the current situation.
What is this thread not?
This thread is not the thread to try and devise a perfect and all-encompassing constitution. That can and will be done gradually over the course of CoTech's life. Once we have agreed the starting constitution then we can start amending it as we see fit.
So:
If you have any critical concerns that the constitution below a.) is materially inaccurate or b.) absolutely requires something which is missing, please let us know.
LINK: This is the constitution as it stands: https://wiki.coops.tech/wiki/Wortley_Hall_2017/CoTech_Constitution
P.S. there was mention of adding a dissolution clause but I am not certain of this as CoTech is not encorporated etc.
Poll Created Thu 25 Jan 2018 4:41PM
Clarify implicit rules around UK-based membership criteria to allow us to ratify the first version of the constitution Closed Thu 1 Feb 2018 4:03PM
Thank you to everyone for participating in this thread and in particular Luke for kicking off the discussion.
We have a constitution! I've updated the constitution on the wiki to reflect this proposal and have removed the "draft" status.
The constitution has details about how we change the constitution itself, so if people would like to propose changes there's now a mechanism to do so.
Thanks again!
Chris
I think it would be really good to ratify a "good enough for now" version of the constitution so that we have a basis on which to propose amendments / clarifications etc.
A reminder - the objective of this exercise is not to write a constitution that everyone agrees on, but rather to capture in words, in one place, the way we work at the moment in various online threads, email chains, slack channels etc. Once we have something written down, we can then change and improve it over time.
To that end, I've looked into some of the decisions we've made in the past on membership criteria based on ties to the UK. I've found three examples:
We were contacted by email (contact@) on 21/07/2017 by http://agaric.coop/ and didn't put their membership enquiry to a vote on Loomio because they weren't UK based.
On 07/09/2017 we were contacted by email (contact@) by someone looking to start a co-op in Austin, Texas. We offered help but told them CoTech was UK-based at the moment.
In this Loomio thread we allowed dtc to join https://www.loomio.org/p/9zZAoSBi. They are legally based in France but have members based in the UK.
Based on this it doesn't seem that we have applied very exact rulings. Therefore:
Proposal
Under "Who is eligible to join?... Your co-operative must" I propose adding the bullet point "be based in or have significant ties to the UK". I think this captures the implicit rules we have applied so far.
If this proposal passes and we consider that wording to be good enough for now, I suggest someone then starts a discussion and proposals to amend the wording and more cleary define the rules.
Results
| Results | Option | % of points | Voters | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
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Agree | 92.9% | 13 |
|
| Abstain | 7.1% | 1 |
|
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| Disagree | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Block | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Undecided | 0% | 90 |
|
14 of 104 people have participated (13%)
Harry "Outlandish" Robbins
Thu 25 Jan 2018 5:28PM
I think this would be a totally awesome step in the right direction! Thanks @chrislowis for pushing it
Harry "Outlandish" Robbins
Thu 25 Jan 2018 5:29PM
Outlandish think this would be a totally awesome step in the right direction! Thanks @chrislowis for pushing it
James Mead (Go Free Range)
Thu 25 Jan 2018 7:02PM
This seems like a good starting point to me. Thanks for doing the research into previous decisions.
Thomas Parisot (dtc innovation)
Fri 26 Jan 2018 6:28AM
It seems fair and it reflects well what the scope of "UK" means with this proposal :-)
Graham
Fri 26 Jan 2018 9:05AM
Thanks for doing the work on this. A sensible step forward.
Aaron Hirtenstein
Fri 26 Jan 2018 9:54AM
Thanks for doing this, Chris. This sounds sensible to me and a reflection of things to date.
Stephen Hawkes
Sat 27 Jan 2018 8:04AM
Developer Society
Sion Whellens (Principle Six/Calverts)
Mon 29 Jan 2018 7:51PM
I don’t think there is an implicit rule that the coop has to be either UK based / have UK ties, or that we need clarification on the subject at this stage.
Sion Whellens (Principle Six/Calverts)
Tue 30 Jan 2018 12:16PM
I don’t think there is an implicit rule that the coop has to be either UK based / have UK ties, or that we need clarification on the subject at this stage.