Notice of Special General Meeting: April 9, 2014

nzLARPS
#1

NZLARPS will be holding a Special General Meeting to vote on a constitutional amendment relating to NZLARPS’ regional structure. The background to this amendment is here. Information and discussion can be found here

When: 19:00, Wednesday, 9 April 2014
Where: 18 Faulder Ave, Westmere

The business to be conducted is as follows:

[ul]
[li] Election of a returning officer for email votes;[/li]
[li] Motion 1
That section 12(b) be replaced by the following:
“The Regional Branch must have 15 members”[/li]
[li] Motion 2
That section 12(b) be replaced by the following:
“The Regional Branch must have 10 members”[/li][/ul]

Because of the requirement for email voting, no amendments will be accepted from the floor.

A two-thirds majority of members voting is required to pass a constitutional amendment. The two proposed motions are incompatible. In the event that both motions pass, the motion with the greatest number of votes will be adopted. In the event of a tie, the matter will be resolved by the chair’s casting vote.

Quorum for the meeting is 25 people. However, those casting electronic votes count for the purposes of quorum.

Any member may vote by email. At the start of the meeting a returning officer will be elected who will have the responsibility of tallying up the votes. To vote, email your ballot (below) to: nzlarps2014sgm@gmail.com. Email voting is not anonymous but only the vote counter will be able to see the emails, and they will subsequently be deleted.

Below are the things you need to vote on for the SGM if voting by Email:

Motion 1:
Yes
No
Abstain

Motion 2:
Yes
No
Abstain

SGM motions - straw poll
Auckland Committee Meeting - April 9th
NZLARPS National Committee quarterly summary May 2014
#2

Do abstentions count towards the “number of members voting”? I wouldn’t have thought so. E.g. if there are 10 abstentions, 20 Yes votes and 10 No votes for a motion, I think that constitutes a 2/3 majority. Is that correct?

Presumably abstention votes still count towards quorum?

#3

The constitution says amendments require “a two-third majority of the total number of members of the Society present at a General Meeting”. Members abstaining are still present. In the example above, the motion would fail.

(Thanks for pointing this out BTW; I still need to draft up instructions for the returning officer, and this should probably be part of them).

Yes.

#4

I think that would make abstaining on a motion functionally identical to voting “No”. They’d be reported differently, but have the same result.

I’m just concerned that the vote will get split and both motions may fail, even if there is a 2/3 majority that would be happy enough with either motion (but have a preference for one). Being able to abstain on an unfavoured option in order to have it not count towards the total would get around that.

Perhaps we need to have a good discussion of it, to get clarity of which way things are swinging, so .

Personally I prefer to move to a 10 member minimum for new branches. I’d like to make it easy for new branches to start in smaller cities and towns. Larp is local, and a distant “big” branch is not nearly as useful as a small local one. Not all local larpers will join the society, so 10 members might represent a community of 40 larpers, which is a plenty big community to make a local branch valuable. Once the branch forms, it may well grow from there once it proves its value.

However, I’d also be happy for the minimum to stay at 15. So if that’s the way the vote is swinging, I will vote Yes to both because I don’t want both motions to fail.

#5

Can people nominate a proxy?

#6

Pretty much.

This is a risk. People should consider carefully which way they vote.

#7

There is no provision for proxy votes. If you don’t want to attend the meeting you can vote by email by sending your vote to nzlarps2014sgm@gmail.com

You do not need to give a reason for voting by email - it is now available as of right.

#8

Reminder: If you have not voted by email, please do so. We need a certain quorum of voting members in order for this to pass. If we don’t make quorum, we may have to do it all again at the AGM…

#9

I’m posting this as chair of the meeting. We have a result! Motion One was declared passed after receiving 18 votes for ‘Yes’ out of 27 votes cast and accepted.

There’s one slight complication though. Mike Curtis, acting as returning officer, counted 17 votes for ‘Yes’ out of 27, which would have been one vote off reaching the required two-thirds majority. A recount was conducted by Phillip Brown, who counted 18 votes for ‘Yes’ out of 27 (he had a different result for one online vote). It was put to those in attendance if they were happy to accept Mr Brown’s count as correct, there were no objections to it, and so I declared Motion One passed.

Considering this, if anyone wishes to object to Motion One being considered passed, could they please do so here, or by PMing me. I will hold off filing the change with the Registrar until at least this coming Wednesday to give everyone time to do so.

P.S. Sorry about posting this up so long after the meeting, I’ve had a manic few days since.

#10

As it has been a week and I haven’t heard a single objection, I have now filed the change with the Registrar.

#11

Thanks James.

#12

Just curious, do we get to see the minutes of this meeting?

#13

I understand that Clare, the Auckland Secretary, took minutes; they’ll be released along with the Auckland ones.

#14

I’ve posted them :slight_smile:

#15

Thanks heaps! Will there be minutes from the other meeting/topics discussed that night?

#16

[quote=“amphigori”]Thanks heaps! Will there be minutes from the other meeting/topics discussed that night?[/quote]Yip, that’ll be under the Auckland meeting minutes (the SGM was conducted first as a separate meeting). The Auckland ones will probably take longer to go up, as there was a lot more discussed, and thus it is a lot more work for Clare to get them written up.