Soup Update From the President

Announcements
,
1

Hello to All,

We just passed the halfway mark in February and some of you may be wondering what's going on with the Annual General Meeting (AGM). Put bluntly, it will be late this year. Marshalling the resources to make the meeting happen is proving to be difficult.

Some articles of Bylaw 1 are relevant to understanding this situation, so let me quote portions of some:

  • Article 12 — The corporation shall publish the notice of meeting, no later than 30 days before the day on which the meeting is to be held, to its announcements channel, to which members are subscribed by default, and pin it as a site-wide banner;

  • Article 19 — The Annual Meeting of the Membership shall be held each year in the month of February for the election of Officers, Board members at large and the transaction of any necessary business;

  • Article 24.a — Two months before the annual meeting, the President appoints a Nominating Committee of three or more members of the.fmsoup.org, one of whom should be a member of the Board of Directors;

  • Article 24.b — The Nominating Committee reports its slate of nominees for existing vacancies to the membership one month prior to the annual meeting.

Note that, following the adoption of Bylaw #2 at the 2022 AGM, an election to fill vacant board of director positions now occurs every year at the AGM.

Thanks to Articles 19 and 24.a, the Nominating Committee must be announced in December. It has a short month to do its work. December is a difficult month for any volunteering. We must create the committee in November, month of the Annual Funding Drive, another difficult month.

You might have seen the call for Nominating Committee volunteers on December 22. No one responded so we created a short-staffed Committee composed of existing volunteers. They were unfortunately unable to free up time in December or January. Both months are busy ones for most people and these volunteers already perform other Soup duties.

The board is waiting until the Committee completes its work before publishing the notice of meeting. Publishing the notice before the committee completes its work could force us to amend the notice to comply with Articles 12 and 24.b. Our experience with the 2022 AGM has shown us that amending this notice results in negative outcomes for an AGM.

So what is the board doing to mitigate this issue in the future? We are considering proposing amendments to the bylaws to shift the AGM at a different time of the year to avoid the November and December time crunches. We are also looking at ways to improve volunteer recruitment because, honestly, The Soup is weak in this area.

In closing, I ask and thank you for your patience as we complete our preparatory work for the AGM. I also ask you to share your suggestion, if you have any, for improvements in these areas.

Your Soup President

6 Likes