Steering minutes: 2014-03-23

Special Notes:

Changing the structure and mandate of Steering Committee

Agenda:

Revising Steering Committee mandate

Minutes:

Great Oak Steering Committee Minutes -- 3/23/14

Attended: Adi, Becky H., Gayle, Hermann, Judith, Sari, Willie and Helen

Revising the current Steering Committee mandate - it's important to know what we want first Historical understanding - fostering communication between the committees and emergency decision making, such as construction. The time has passed, we don't need to make these decisions on a regular basis anymore. If there is an emergency, then steering can be convened on an as-needed basis.

There is a legal reason to have steering, because we need a president. It could just be served by having a convener. The Steering Critical Needs Fund can remain as well, the conveners of the committees could serve as the steering reps when there's a request for the money, or if there's an emergency, prompting them to meet.

Would the TS liason continue? Yes, there are still a lot of things we need to communicate with them about, but those needs could fall under the committees where the communication is needed.

There are 2 other things that steering should be responsible for: triaging issues which don't obviously fall within an existing committee. Secondly, if a committee is thinking of dissolving, steering should have initial discussions around this. It was suggested that this would fall within the triaging role.

Steering could remain as a "ghost" committee even with these roles.

We could drop steering rep positions from the work allotment. What would the steering get for work credit? They don't have any special responsibilities aside from signing the occasional document and calling the rare meeting.

The mandate could be trimmed / or left in place, perhaps 2 people could work on trimming the existing mandate. It was suggested that Helen and someone from Process work on this. Many people felt that most of the content should be trimmed, (jokingly one suggestion was to only leave the title).

Most people felt the steering convener gets work credit, like .5 hour per work season.

The next step for Helen would be send out her proposed revision to the steering committee, once steering agrees with the document, then it will go to the community for a revised agreement.

No subsequent meeting is planned. The proposed revision would be discussed and approved via email.