I'm a bit worried about the last bullet-point of Section 4:
"Attempting to exploit or misuse the society or members of the society for pecuniary gain"
I'm not a lawyer, but on face value, this seems to include into "ground for expulsion" a very wide range of arguably legitimate behaviours such as:
Inviting a fellow member to be a partner in a tech startup Offering one's services to another member as a prospective employee or contractor Getting technical help via the WLUG mailing list regarding (say) Apache or PostgreSQL, to help him/her develop a for-profit website
Can someone offer clarification?
I agree - there are a number of existing rules that are quite specific where I think greater generality would work better. Because of the potential for unfairness I was tempted to make the provisions about expulsion more detailed also - expanding on the right of the member proposed to be expelled, to be able to respond to allegations - but decided the situation of an expulsion was most unlikely to arise and didn't presently warrant more complexity in the charter.
In this particular provision, "misuse" is fairly clear as involving an improper intention, but "exploit" is not so objectionable. Making a profit from the exploiter's association with WLUG - the "for pecuniary gain" bit - might merely involve describing a useful relationship, or might for example involve pretending to have an endorsement.
It would be better to lose the effect of the specific description in that line by substituting it with, say, "Bringing the society into disrepute" (which I believe would apply to my example, if the good name of WLUG was being associated with some private financial punt). Any comments?
I second the "into disrepute" wording.
I've also found another amendment that could be made - in Rule 7 the word "earlier" should be inserted in the first sentence of the fourth paragraph before "resign", so the sentence reads "Officers and committee members whether elected or appointed shall hold office until the next Annual General Meeting or, earlier, resign or are removed by the committee under Rule 4." "earlier" is intended to apply to both resignation and removal. It avoids the alternative amendment of hanging off the end of the sentence an addition saying "whichever happens first".
I second that, too. Typos: - Rule 5: "two week's" should read "two weeks" - Society, President, Treasurer, Secretary should be consistent in using an upper case first letter. Apart from that, I haven't spotted anything else. Thanks a lot for looking into this, Ryan! Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174