Adventure Riding NZ's Future

Hi Eddie

I have had a little experience with incorporated societies through involvement with Save the Children and a large football club in Auckland.

SCNZ had regional sub sections and I would recommend against doing that. It multiplies the administrative load as you need to effectively duplicate committees in any regions. Some will be more active than others. My experience is that all parts of the organisation, including the main committee will sooner or later struggle with finding people willing to take on the specified roles.

Hence it would be my advice to keep things as lean and as simple as possible. I would say have just one committee, with as few officers as possible. I found people were more willing to take on a task that had a distinct purpose and timeframe than “be on a committee”.

While the rules seek to run the IS (not such a good acronym anymore) in a democratic manner, what will work best is power in the hands of a benevolent dictator, who can be deposed with a bit of effort.

My comments on the rules are taken from that experience.
Rule 4.3 requires a minimum of 6 committee members at committee meetings – Why? Less would be better and easier in the long term
Rule 5 gives a lot of say to the membership and could make a rod for your own back. My experience is that only a very few people will do any useful work for the society and they are likely to be on your committee. However if its like the football club, there will be no shortage of armchair experts, down the track,telling you how it should be done – this rule gives them power to do that. Keep more power at committee level I suggest by ditching a, c and d. Keep b to get rid of any megalomaniac chairpersons….
Rule 8.1 f….the committee cannot ensure anything much and certainly not the behaviour of members. That’s too high a standard and sets up the committee for unfair criticism if one of the members does something very silly. Suggest that changes to “consider any alleged breaches of the Rules by members” or something like that
Rule 9.1 a – in this context I think this “ensure” is talking about the committee behaving itself. Oversee would be a better term, I believe.
Rule 10 – suggest that you add a definition of “attend” and “present” to the end of the rules (Rule 27), given that meetings need to be able to happen on line, given your geographically disparate membership. It should be a fairly inclusive definition if you want involvement from as many people as possible. For example, can I vote if I am online and not actually “there”??? Contributing by text message? etc etc.
Rule 14 – very cumbersome in my view. Suggest add a line to the duties of the committee to consider cessation of any membership, with their decision final. With all due respect, its just a motorcycle club.
Rule 20. Unless we are talking about large sums of money I would go for a review – it will be less costly and carry less responsibility for the reviewer, thus easier to obtain.
Rule 21.8 The rules need to consider some from of digital voting. (Even though the government cant manage it!)
Do you really need a provision for a secret ballot? A bit OTT?
Rule 26d. Its not unusual I believe to nominate a charity to which any surplus proceeds are donated. This means that its not in anyone’s pecuniary interest to wind up the society.

Just my thoughts for what they are worth
Cheers

You’re welcome Eddie. Understood re using a proforma draft, entirely appropriate. The challenge is to make the running of the thing as simple as possible, for whoever takes over. You will be able to gauge how easy it will be to make that happen by the number of people that actually take the time to read and comment on your draft rules.

an edit to my comments, for the sake of clarity
Rule 14 – very cumbersome in my view. Suggest delete this entire rule and instead add a line to the duties of the committee to consider cessation of any membership, with their decision final. With all due respect, its just a motorcycle club.

Cheers

Happy to help. Have sent you an email re this.

When Mark lets me, that is. 🙂

Hi Mark
There was more discussion on the rules thing on the Facebook page than on here but trouble with that is things disappear off the radar pretty quickly. Is there a way to “sticky” it to the top of the page so people see it a bit more often?

Just a thought

I’ll come too…..if I’m still welcome that is.
Miranda Pub?? About half way and we get to ride round the Kaiaua Coast :):)
Suggest you pick a couple of dates that work for you and Jennifer and then we can pick the one that suits best?

Midday…..on the 16th.