Executive Committee minutes
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I didn’t receive the minutes myself until last night. I’ll add an item to the February EC agenda asking if anything can be done to get the minutes circulated in a more timely manner.
“I didn’t receive the minutes myself until last night. I’ll add an item to the February EC agenda asking if anything can be done to get the minutes circulated in a more timely manner.”
While I understand that BD has given an assurance to publish EC minutes in future on this forum would it also be possible for them to appear in email form on Spintcom to facilitate viewing by non-members and party members not able to access the Files section.
We shouldn’t forget that we are talking here only about the draft minutes, not the official record which is these as adopted by the EC at the next following meeting often, in fact nearly always, as amended.
As far as I know, the adopted minutes are not published (or for that matter exist) anywhere. Best practice is that they should and be signed by the person who chaired the meeting at which they are adopted. After all, they are the only official record of what was decided At the moment to see what has actually been decided at, say, the January meeting you need to have both the draft minutes for that month and the draft minutes for February which will contain the amendments.
Instead of publishing the draft minutes everywhere it might make more sense to publish them only on spintcom as this is meant primarily for members and to publish here only the final version as amended and adopted.
In any event I don’t see the point of publishing the draft minutes in both places and the adopted minutes nowhere.
While I understand that BD has given an assurance to publish EC minutes in future on this forum would it also be possible for them to appear in email form on Spintcom to facilitate viewing by non-members and party members not able to access the Files section.
This is something the General Secretary had agreed to take on, though he had written to me a while back that he was unsure about the exact procedure. I’ve posted the backlog of EC minutes from 2019 just now and have explained to the General Secretary the new procedure for posting the minutes to the spintcom mailing list.
“I’ve posted the backlog of EC minutes from 2019 just now and have explained to the General Secretary the new procedure for posting the minutes to the Spintcom mailing list.”
Thanks Tristan; that’s extremely helpful. Also for the agenda for the February 2020 EC meeting.
But these are only the draft minutes and so only of limited interest now, for academics and others interested in how our decision-making procedures work in practice.
What is relevant are the final minutes as amended and adopted. Only these are the official version of what took place and what was decided. These are the only ones that have any standing in terms of the Rulebook.
Sure, I agree. But they are all I have available. In principle it is possible to reconstruct the final minutes by looking ahead to the next month’s minutes and applying the amendments. However, lately the EC has not been rigorously and unambiguously wording its amendments, or else the General Secretary has not been recording them verbatim in the minutes. (I don’t know for sure which of these is the case, as I don’t attend the meetings myself.) For example, there have been one or two occasions where the draft minutes neglected to include the names of new members, and when this was pointed out at the next meeting, the EC resolved only “to add the names”, without stating what the names actually were. The EC and/or General Secretary may need to enforce some discipline in how amendments are worded and recorded. (When I was taking minutes, it was a common practice to require all motions and amendments to be submitted in writing so that they could be recorded exactly in the minutes. I would always raise a point of order when a motion was worded too ambiguously.)
“But these are only the draft minutes and so only of limited interest now, for academics and others interested in how our decision-making procedures work in practice.”
Really? They may be of “limited interest” to some but certainly not to those members and others who consider there is nowhere near enough transparency in Party affairs. Better to have draft minutes than none at all. Having been an Executive Committee member for many years, it’s relatively rare in my experience for the adopted minutes to depart significantly, if indeed at all in the vast majority of cases, from the draft versions.
“But these are only the draft minutes and so only of limited interest now, for academics and others interested in how our decision-making procedures work in practice.
What is relevant are the final minutes as amended and adopted. Only these are the official version of what took place and what was decided. These are the only ones that have any standing in terms of the Rulebook.”
So effectively those of us not in the know, i.e. not EC members or not in the London/SE area, we won’t get to know what was discussed until a month after it’s been discussed?
Surely it’s better to have the draft minutes available than no information at all?
“it’s relatively rare in my experience for the adopted minutes to depart significantly, if indeed at all in the vast majority of cases, from the draft versions.”
You must have suspected when you wrote that that you were giving a hostage to fortune and that I would check my recollection (from seeing EC Minutes at my branch meetings) that, on the contrary, it is relatively rare for the draft minutes not to be amended before adoption.
I did check and only 2 of the 12 draft Minutes were not amended, some significantly. For instance, the January minutes were amended in February:
“Amendment and adoption of the minutes of the January 2018 meeting (p. 8)
Elaborate upon item 2(d)iii in regards to the payment received from next door within the January minutes.
(The contractors next door wish to erect scaffolding which would need to extend onto our land and this to remain in place for up to 20 weeks. Cde Chesham had negotiated a payment to us for the inconvenience in the sum of £100 per week, amounting in total to £2K. This amount has now been paid to us.)
Noted in the treasurers report commission.
Chesham/Shannon–RESOLUTION: “That the amended minutes be adopted.”
(Agreed)”Surely this financial agreement and payment counts as significant.
And the August Meetings were amended in September to:
“Amendment and adoption of the previous meeting minutes (p. 12)
a) Note from the Assistant Secretary (29 August): There appears to be a typographical or chronological error in the recording of the breaks, the first of which is recorded as “Meeting adjourned for break at 3:30PM – resumed at 3:45PM”, and the second as “Meeting adjourned for break at 2:19PM – resumed at 2:30PM”. – Actioned
(b) Re §7(a), the Assistant Secretary requests the minutes be amended to indicate who moved the Notice of Business – Actioned, moved by M.Browne
5(a)ii To read that Comrade Chesham verbally confirmed his resignation from the EC.
3(b)iii to confirm the request of funds by the WSPUS as having been withdrawn.
Notice of business to state M.Browne as having been the mover.
RESOLUTION: Kennedy/Browne -“That the minutes be adopted.” (Agreed).”
I would have thought that the resignation of an EC Member was also significant.
I agree of course that draft Minutes are better than none, but it is not as if these had not been seen before. They will all have been sent to branches and, most of them at least, to those individual members who have elected to receive them either by post or by email. They have also been published on the files section of Spintcom.
I am sure you will agree that it would be much more transparent to have published last year’s minutes as adopted than leaving it up to those interested to have to always check with the following month’s minutes to see if nothing (or rather what) was changed in the one they are looking at.
I agree of course that draft Minutes are better than none, but it is not as if these have not been seen before.
I expect they will not have been seen before by non-members, who don’t have access to the spintcom files section.
So their republication cannot be described as a flash of transparency.
There are other reasons besides transparency for making the plain-text versions available on spintcom: they are much easier to index and search. Any decent mail client will let you easily search these minutes for keywords of interest, whereas it is not so easy to do this using the PDF versions. Maybe not everyone needs to perform such searches on a regular basis, though I can attest that it is absolutely vital for preparing the agendas and responding to members’ queries about EC decisions. (Members occasionally ask me at what EC meeting such-and-such was decided, and most of the time I can answer the question with a quick search of spintcom messages. I expect that more resourceful members already do this themselves rather than bothering me, and I would prefer that they continue to do so!)
I take your point about some of them not having been available before to non-members but the only ones they (and Dave) won’t have seen before are those from August to November as he published from January to July here. Not checked but some of these might have appeared as messages on spintcom, old and/or new.
In any event, for the functioning of party democracy, it is members having speedy access to them that is important and relevant. Providing access for non-members is just icing on the cake to show that all our internal workings are open to public scrutiny, which is a different principle.
Even if we didn’t publish the minutes on the internet they would still have been public in that non-members still had the right to see them by writing for paper copies or visiting head office to consult them. We don’t really need to mollycoddle them. Only party members have that right.
“Even if we didn’t publish the minutes on the internet they would still have been public in that non-members still had the right to see them by writing for paper copies or visiting head office to consult them.”
Haha. I can just see our fellow-workers queuing up to do that.
“We don’t really need to mollycoddle them.”
I applaud the initiative shown by TM and BD for at least making the draft EC minutes more readily available to members and non-members alike. Socialists are democrats and the more freely and easily we disseminate information the better for all concerned. Mollycoddling doesn’t enter into it.
The next step is for the EC minutes to be less opaque and more detailed, providing details of arguments made and how and why individual EC members reached their decisions. That should greatly assist the party membership when they come to cast their votes in the annual ballot. It may even increase turnout.
“The next step is for the EC minutes to be less opaque and more detailed, providing details of arguments made and how and why individual EC members reached their decisions. That should greatly assist the party membership when they come to cast their votes in the annual ballot. It may even increase turnout.”
Is there any good reason why EC meetings should not be videoed by some sort of Skype system and placed on the web? EC members already participate via Skype, which I think has limited access for observers but other similar software available are more flexible for viewers.
We can easily create standing orders rules where the videoing can be momentarily suspended on confidentiality grounds when the occasion arises.
A small step towards the introduction of internet interactive conferences and ADMs.
Even judges are now providing some access to cameras
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/tv-cameras-set-allowed-courts-17576114
“Is there any good reason why EC meetings should not be videoed by some sort of Skype system and placed on the web?”
Yes, plenty.
First, it would be a waste of resources; if we are to do this sort of thing the priority should be our externally oriented propaganda meetings and not those concerned with internal housekeeping.
Second, these videos would be deadly boring. Three hours of undisciplined discussion, with EC members repeating themselves or what other EC members have already said, about renewing our insurance, breakdown of heating at head office, subcommittee terms of reference, calls for nominations, reports or conference agenda items, even if in the end the EC generally reaches a sensible conclusion. Nobody would watch more than one.
Third, it is not necessary. Adequate arrangements already exist via the minutes on spintcom to inform members, and even non-members, of what the EC discusses and decides.
So, no, we don’t need an EC You Tube channel neither to inform members nor to show to non-members that we are an open, democratic organisation.
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