One of our tasks for preparing to buy a site is to organise the appointment of the different entities of the société simple (e.g. organe de gestion, comité des sages).
To get started, could you have a look at the proposal that was made re the enlargement of the board of the ASBL (internal link), and tell me if the practical bit of the process (under selection process) seems to work for you or if we would need another system?
If we can keep it as is, then we would just need to adapt the quality lists to match the different entities , and potentially rewrite the explanation on roles and responsabilities.
If you think we need a new process, then propose it, or if needed, we could also create yet another helping circle! But I get the feeling that we should be able to do without on this occasion…
Also just a confirmation: we don’t need to enlarge the board of the ASBL anymore, do we?
I think the Board and the Comité de Sages are two different things that deserve two different threads.
For the Comité de Sages we need 2-3 notaries, judges or lawyers who are willing to (sort of) be on our Committee pro bono. This will require a short explainer of what The Reef is and why we are worthy of there time, and then for all Reeflings to screen their networks.
For the Board we could follow the same model as the one for the Board of the asbl. I would personally go for a very short term to begin with, as it is not fully clear how we are going to do all this. So for a first term I would put +/- 6 months, with the understanding that these will be the people who will sign the purchase deal and afterwards the compromis.
A small practical detail here is that we want everybody to be able to express their voice, so I was wondering whether we cannot do a anonymous online vote for the first round.
For the Board of the asbl I would leave things as they are, but if somebody is willing to take care of the administrative hassle we can of course also do another selection process for that.
Not a lot to add. I think Sarah meant this thread to be for the board selection process as a starting point, so I’m going to focus on that…
I think the process works, and can be tweaked to address Lie’s concerns about everybody being able to express their voice…
(@Lee - a measure of how far we’ve come that we’re now able to critique Ted and Jerry for potential lack of inclusivity )
If everybody writes their names on sticky notes at the beginning and puts them in a pile in front of them, during the first round they can hand them to the facilitator, who writes each new name on the board and invites each person in the round to give their one or two sentences as the sticky notes go up.
It would be nice, but with an all-new board of directors to create, I think we are going to struggle to find people who accept the leadership position. Damn.
Indeed, I was thinking mostly about the board, as it seemed that it was the most urgent thing. So I’ve changed the name of this post, and we will need to create another one for the comité des sages, which we maybe put on the backlog just for a little bit? I feel that this can wait 2 or 3, let me know if you disagree. Can we already decide on who can take responsibility for this though, so that we don’t loose track?
I can take care of updating the document for the board selection
Following up on the discussion from the last plenary, we will have a lot of different roles to fill in at once: SoSim board, coordinator(s), secretary and treasurer (+ what else actually?), so we will need to come up with a process that takes all of this together as a whole to be able to distribute responsability well.
I don"t really see us doing all the roles at once and maybe a possible way to do this could be:
we do all the nomination rounds and change rounds for each role, so we get an overview of where people could be
for each we write down the list of people that were most nominated, keeping track of the order. We keep the names of as many people as we have positions.
we hear from the nominated persons, and see whether that changes things a bit (as Alberto was saying, people might say “I’m doing this if you’re doing that”, or “I’m doing this if somebody else does it with me”, etc…), and whether we can get to an agreement
somebody comes up with a final proposal and we do consent
It doesn’t really change the process at all, but I don’t really see how else to do it… Ideas?
As for the anonymity, I don’t see how we are going to do this if people don’t say who they want on each role? Are you saying we don’t do selection process but resort to a vote? Or do you mean that people send a name + reason to somebody from team governance and that person lists the names of the nominees and reasons cited? And we do that another time for the change round?
One thing that we might want to do is to think ahead whether it would be a good thing to have an overlap between the board and the other roles. For instance, I think it makes sense that the treasurer be on the board. It may be the same for the coordinator (although I’m not sure).
It’s a lot of things, so I’m gonna go a little telegraphic:
Comité des Sages:
Yes I think this can wait for a bit, but it would nevertheless be good to be prepared. This is a legal issue though, so I would leave this to Team Finance & Legal.
Selection process:
Roles for which I think we need a selection process:
Group Coordinator and back-up
Full Members meeting Coordinator (if this proposal is consented to)
Secretary
Accountant and back-up
How to run the selection process: all in all it’s not so different from a simple selection process, and I have an idea of how it could be facilitated. I can’t write it all up, but we would need a beamer and an Excel sheet, a UNO game (for coloured cards) and a piece of paper per person.
Board of the société simple:
In the first stage I would decouple this from everything else that we do. So I would do a simple selection process, where we look for 5 people that meet the qualification “who do you trust the most to not sign anything that could get us into serious trouble?”. We could set a short term for this - say 3 months? - to get us through the purchase phase.
As you say, at some point we’ll need a smart link with the Team Administration roles and probably also with the Coordination Group. This requires some thought, so I would keep that for our next meeting?
Board of the asbl:
For the asbl the question will be whether we can find a volunteer who is willing to go through the administrative process. If yes, let’s do a selection process
In light of the possible urgency that we are facing it seemed more efficient to me if I would just sit down and put forward a first proposal, mostly based on how I understand the statutes.
Would somebody be willing and able to pick up this draft and take it to the finish? As long as we get to a proposal to the plenary, please feel welcome to ignore my entire draft or to change anything that you see fit.
The key element that is missing is the part on liability of the Board members, which is something that @els and @Sarah are working on in the context of the insurance that we may be buying. Would it be possible for you to add a short section that clarifies the key notions of the Board members’ liability?
Thanks for this @Lee ! I’ve read the proposal, and it looks clear and well-thought out to me
There is just one point in Section 7 that I’m not clear on with regard to facilitating the process :
Given the significant responsibility that the Board members will be taking up, we could then do a third round in which the people who were selected by many people get to express 1) whether they would consent to being on the Board, and 2) whether they have any preferences or objections about who else will be on the Board.
In a possible scenario where someone objects on the grounds of 1) or 2), do we go back to the beginning of the process? Or do we select our list of 5 people with a number 6 and 7 in mind? I can’t find anything in my sociocracy resources that clarifies this…
Below is a link to the form where you can indicate your five choices for who should be on the initial board of the société simple. Please read Lie’s proposal (above), in particular Sections 1 (role description), 2 (qualifications) and 3 (process). Having done that, fill in the form, ideally well before tomorrow’s plenary…
I added a chapter on the liability of the members of the Board, but i must admit I don’t feel absolutely comfortable doing that (and translating it to English). So i would be gratefull if sb could have a look at it.
As the insurance companies didn’t yet answer me, i am planning to phone a couple of them tomorrow (Sarah will be contacting Ethias with whom we have our insurance for the asbl) with the goal to make an appointment for next wednesday (hopefully). So I hope i will have a firmer view on things after that as well.
Hello @reef-governance, I read the proposal, great work! I have one question though. One round of “explaining our rationale for choosing the people that we choose” is going to be quite long. If everyone is there, we will have 16 people each going over 5 people, which means 80 explanations. That’s a long round, and a lot to keep in mind, and we might need to do more than one. What are your thoughts around this issue?
Assuming there are about 7-8 candidates, there will be a first round on each. One person will explain (fairly briefly) why they nominated candidate A, and then everyone else who also nominated candidate A will be able to add something. It’s realistic (I hope) to expect that most people won’t have much to add to the first 2-3 speakers in each round (this will be explicitly encouraged), so it should go fairly quickly. There’ll also be the possibility that there are objections. The same process applies to the second round when people can change their vote, but there will be a much smaller proportion of people who do so, and as with the first round, people speaking later will be encouraged to say that they agree with what has already been said if they don’t have anything new to add. It could potentially go quite smoothly… potentially
one question: all the documents (contracts,…): how does it work uptill now (for the asbl,…): they are all in french? or you have them in dutch/french or french/english.
My assumption is that they are in french, in that case i would argue to have - if possible- at least one native french speaker on the Board. (or solve this issue some other way)
(added the comment in the doc)
I have a side question regarding the powers of the board: what is the rationale between having the board deciding on accepting and excluding members, and not the General Assembly? I’m sorry, I know this should have been asked before but I need to understand because it’s not obvious to me.
We should ask the notary, but from what I can see on the internet this seems like something that you can freely choose, and possibly something that we indeed should have changed. The website I found suggests to submit this for the approval of the GA. See e.g. Can a Partner be Expelled from a Partnership? - Helix Law
In the asbl in Article 9 §1b, it says the decision is taken with a 66% majority by the GA.
Hello Sarah, according to article 9.1, the admission of a new associés is a responsibility of the general assembly, whereas the exclusion is in the hands of the executive board and/or the comités de sages (see 9.7/9.8/9.9) “due to a serious disagreement and/or a sufficiently serious fault to undermine the trust of the Executive Board.”
Correct. So IMHO that begs the questions why so much power will be invested in 3 individuals, without any input from the GA. There is probably a good reason for that, but I will feel more comfortable if I understand it better.
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