Opening up Council meetings

aimee

Welcome to Spring!

The year’s flown by. As part of a number of conversations the Council has been having recently about being more transparent and communicative, we’ve decided to start openly publishing the decisions and actions that come out of each Council meeting.

Our reasons are multiple, and mirror some of the primary principles behind open government:

  • openness and transparency - as an organisation dedicated to openness, we should be as open and transparent as possible
  • accountability and participation - if we make decisions and you don’t see us holding to them, you can call us on it
  • trust - to show our members and stakeholders that we’re listening to you, taking action, and working to grow and improve the Society.

So let‘s get started!

Council meeting – 1 August 2018

Decisions

  • Dave to create a readable review of the current Constitution.
  • Rob suggests a formal review of the proposed new Constitution by a lawyer to ensure that the document is sound (see “Actions).
  • Dave to create survey “vote” for the AGM.
  • Councillors need to discuss Constitution in #general and #constitution on Rocket.Chat.
    • Note to clarify: to increase general engagement with the proposed new Constitution, councillors will start making more noise about it on the above channels :)

Actions

  • Carl, Dave, and aimee (if available - she’s travelling) to have a hackathon on the new NZOSS site and get it up and running. We’ll then ask people to review and asap make it live.
    • Note to clarify: we know the current site is far from optimal, and we don‘t want to to delay any further. So we’re going to be releasing it as a work in progress, rather than waiting until it’s perfect. Agile > waterfall!
  • Dave (and others, self-selected) to provide an image that can be CC-By licensed for the front page of the new site.
  • Rob to ask a lawyer he knows to review our proposed Privacy Policy and get a price/quote.
    • Note to clarify: the idea here is to design a modular, GDPR-compliant privacy policy which other, similar organisations in NZ can adapt and use.
  • Rob to look into getting a legal review of our proposed new Constitution.
  • aimee to create synopsis of our Council meeting [ed note: that’s this very post!]. Given limited time and resources, we’re working on a “let’s start as we mean to continue” basis, but please let us know if you want to know about previous decisions / actions :)

Keeping you updated

We’re very keen to keep both our members and all of our other stakeholders up to date on what’s happening. We’ve a number of channels - listed below - but we’d also like to hear from you if there are any you particularly want us to emphasise / use. What works best for you? Here're the current options: