Gathering Views On By-laws - Purpose

Consensus / Issues 16/3/2020

Bylaws

Discussion centred around:

• Adding a preamble to the Scientific Board purpose which encapsulates purpose as being primarily strategy, oversight of TC, Marketing, Training etc, and development of direction. e.g. Strategic direction of the DDI Alliance standards / work products and its promotion and support.

• The current purposes whilst useful, could be viewed as being more functions and to enable it to be more flexible, and grow with the needs of the Alliance, perhaps they could be transformed into standing orders, which would need ratification by another body e.g. either Annual Meeting or Executive if changed. This might mean expansion / revision of current 6 points

• Current organisation by law “to set up sub groups” move to purpose/ standing order , to emphasise co-ordination role of SB.

• Strong agreement that the SB should present a report to the annual meeting on past activities but also that it should be charged with providing a strategic plan for the forthcoming period (as a document with meaningful choices, e.g. options for discussion), so that it had a clear mandate from the Alliance annual meeting

We did discuss specific organisational issues which flowed from the purposes, but leave those as possible options

• Board composition

  • Should election be restricted to just election of Chair/Vice Chair

  • and / or there should be ‘reservations’ to ensure some form of representation from the membership as a whole, this might be geographic or other representations models e.g. archive / research / NSO etc?

• Strong feeling that actual work should be done by small groups from with SB plus others if neccesary / needed and that these should provide reports to SB for approval

An open issue we did not discuss was current SB ByLaw that relates to approval of major revisions, who and how thay should be done

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Notes of Discussion 16/3/2020

Pre-discussion

Gathering Views On By-laws - Purpose

The terms of the Review are to “to propose a restructuring and to draft changes to the Alliance Bylaws” (Jon)

The goal of this temporary group is to restructure the Scientific Board so it is active and engaged throughout the year -- beyond the annual meeting -- and optimally functioning as the scientific and technical body of the Alliance.  (Jared)

NS – two issues, participation and composition (if i may, rather decision making than composition itself), what do we want to solve

Role of SB

• High level

  • Focus

  • Governance 

• To sign off on a product

Bylaws

• Can only provide a structure

• Cannot solve issues. Eg., engagement

• Create a division of labour within DDI

  • EB

  • SB - to direct the WGs/Cttees

    • E.g., Technical, Marketing, Training

Suggestions

• Leave Bylaws as is

  • Provide more detailed governance suggestions - separate from the bylaws

• Future directions, strategy, oversight

  • Need to be more defined

• Define - what is the SB

  • Include future directions here

    • Based on Strategic plan

    • Based on initiatives from WGs

• Annual Mtg

  • Discuss future strategy

  • What has happened in the past year

• Board composition

  • Election of Chair/Vice chair?

  • Geographic representation?

• Composition of small group

  • Not determined by voting?

  • Determined by negotiation? 

Tentative options and changes to be implemented:

• Add some meat on the description of the SB, forward looking and strategy?

  • Strategic direction of the DDI Alliance standards / work products and its promotion and support?

• Move point on organization re setting up sub groups into purpose by laws

• Need to meet more often

  • Frequency of mtg needs to be specified

• Add in something about Executive board about coordination across boards?

Purpose of SB

• Present a report at the annual mtg with meaningful choices for future directions

  • Shares work of SB over the past year

  • Shares priorities of the SB for the year going forward

    • To be approved?

• Defined on a high level in the Bylaws

  • Could delegate to the governance document mentioned below

• On a detailed level

  • To be defined in a governance rule document

    • Or in a standing order for the WGs

      • Can be amended as needed - this needs to be defined/clarified

Composition of SB

• Less constrained

• Ability to attract more people

• How is it ratified by DDI

Voting re: product

• How is this to be handled

Summary of Comments

A summary of the views on the current By Laws are indicated in the Summary row of the table below.

Reinforcement of current By Laws
2. The EB didn’t provide a strategic plan since 2017. The SB Acting Committee could work with the EB on a strategic plan.

Reduction in current By Laws
SB could be mandated commission research and testing not doing it themselves

Extension of current By Laws
An elected Acting Committee with a clear role in the structure of the DDI Alliance could be a good basis. This would not change the Bylaws in the core.

1. It is not clear how the current SB could be active beyond the annual meeting. An Acting Committee could provide a better platform for achieving the goals described above.

2. The TC filled the gap between the EB and the working groups since many years (basically since the first draft of DDI Lifecycle). This made sense for an intermediate period. But the Breckenhill already pointed out that this should be changed.
   If the establishment of an elected Acting Committee will better lead and catalyze the growth of a more-populated and functioning Scientific Board, then I support its creation.

Unclear
This plan should provide a frame for all the work in the working groups. This plan can be on the one hand a high-level working plan and on the other hand a plan for exploring new areas and/or partnering with new people/groups. The general ideas of this are already described in the bylaws. Maybe some more clarification and details would make it more useful.

Related Issues
The working groups work on the details of specific purposes.

Commentary on current practice
The amendment of the bylaws can only provide a better frame for this.
As background: there are a couple of issues which we experience for a long time:
3. The TC filled the gap between the EB and the working groups since many years (basically since the first draft of DDI Lifecycle). This made sense for an intermediate period. But the Breckenhill already pointed out that this should be changed.
4. Only committees / working groups (formal ones or informal ones) with engaged participants can have an impact. A change in the bylaws is only one step. The involvement of additional, new, and younger people is crucial.

ByLaws were revised to address the governance problems experienced by the Alliance at the time as recommended by the Breckenhill Report (July 2011).
The Executive Board replaced the Steering Committee, which was not functioning, and it placed the overall governance of the Alliance in an elected Board.
The Scientific Board was to provide leadership/governance for the technical/scientific/DDI specification, which had been in the TIC and various working groups,
The goal was to establish an organizational division of labor within the Alliance that would allow technical/scientific/domain expertise to populate the Scientific Board functions.
I believe the underlying problem is not so much the ByLaws, but the lack of people to populate the Scientific Board.