[H-GEN] My nomination for President

[Greg Black]

On 2009-08-13, Russell Stuart wrote:

> This is just to let you all know I will be nominating myself for
> President, and to tell you what I plan to do so you can figure out if I
> am worthy of your vote.

In case it has not been done already, I will second Russell's
nomination.  Apart from a couple of minor details which I'll
comment on below, I fully support Russell's plans, especially
with respect to the idea of moving to an open management style.

In that spirit of openness, I will declare my own status
viz-a-viz the AGM.  In the past, I have always declined any
nomination for the Humbug Exec -- partly because of the
commitment involved with open-ended meeting close times and
partly because I've done lots of committee work over the last 40
years and am more or less over it.  However, in the event that
Russell is elected President and provided that I am nominated
and seconded, I would certainly accept a nomination to the Exec
and would support Russell's agenda.  I'm not going to nominate
myself for any position, either now or at the AGM and I will
decline any nomination made prior to the election of the
President.

> If elected president, I will be asking each committee member to submit a
> formal written (electronic) report on their area of responsibility at
> each regular committee meeting.  These will become part of the minutes.

This is something that I am *very* strongly in favour of.

> Secretary       outstanding correspondence from last meeting,
>                 correspondence received, correspondence sent,
>                 date PO Box last checked, date he sent minutes 
>                 from last meeting to general, names of new
>                 financial members (which have been added to a 
>                 wiki page of all financial members).

This is an administrative detail, but I'm not at all in favour
of a wiki page for recording membership.  Back in the mists of
time, somebody invented databases and that's what we should use
for this data -- from there it is easy to expose suitable data
to the website.

I regard the establishment of a proper membership database as a
priority and would be prepared to work on that if it remains
vapourware by the time of the AGM.

> So in summary, the rule is the meeting closes when the last regular
> attendee who is willing to take on the responsibilities associated with
> closing leaves.  It must be no later than UQ permits, of course.

I'm not quite sure how the responsible people, i.e., the Exec,
can ensure that this would work, but I imagine that the new
Exec, whoever they are, can work out the details.

Greg