NASIG Newsletter

2007 BYLAWS AMENDMENTS
Adolfo Tarango, Bylaws Committee Chair

This year the Bylaws Committee presented, and the membership approved, four amendments to the NASIG bylaws.  The impetus for presenting these amendments came from the Executive Board, who had asked the committee to perform an extensive review of our bylaws.  The board especially wanted the committee to remove any language from the bylaws that would prevent NASIG from adopting technological developments for carrying out NASIG business more effectively. Three of the amendments, to Article III, Section 2, to Article VIII, and to Article XII, addressed this by removing or changing text having to do with mailing ballots, allowing the board to move forward with online voting.

The board also asked the committee to address problems with specifically naming committees in the bylaws.  The issue is that anytime the specified committee changes its name, the membership would have to take a vote to change the name in the bylaws. The amendments to Articles VII and XII replaced the specific references to the Nominations & Elections Committee and to the Bylaws Committee with more generic references to those committees. The committee also took the opportunity to rename Article XII to better reflect its content and to eliminate an unnecessary section heading under that article.

Over the years, and especially since the membership approved the nominations through petition process a couple of years ago, the elections process has become very difficult to plan and execute.  On a few occasions, because of the early timing of our annual conference, the specified deadlines for various elections processes were nearly missed.  The board asked the Bylaws Committee to review Article VII, which outlines our elections processes, to see if we could stage the election process better.  After identifying the key conceptual processes of the article, the committee decided to totally rewrite the article and established a new election process.

The revised article now vests the Nominations & Elections Committee with developing the election calendar every year.  This will allow them to accommodate the changing dates of the annual conference and give the membership adequate time to seek nominations by petition.  Addressing a different issue, given current communication technologies, the revised article shortened the period to challenge election results, since members have the means to act more quickly.  In keeping with the board’s requests stated in the previous two paragraphs, the committee also revised the article to delete references to mailing ballots and used a generic reference to a committee.