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Governance and Constitutional Committee Report - 4 March 2006

Meeting held on 21 February 2006 at the INZ Offices.

Present:

Chris Streatfield (Chair),

Michael Wallmannsberger (Deputy Chair), by teleconference

David Harris, by teleconference

Colin Jackson (ex-officio)

In attendance:

Jordan Carter,

Nick Wallingford.

Apologies:

Mark Harris

Agenda:

  1. Voting Software for INZ

  2. Confidentiality of documents

  3. General Business.

Meeting opened at 2:05.

  1. Voting Software

Nick Wallingford kindly joined the meeting for this item of business. Nick gave the Committee a run-down on the current state of play. A large part of the interface and backend DB structure has now been completed and Nick asked the Committee to determine the method of counting of the votees.  There does not appear to be any written defined procedure in place for the current system in use in INZ so we needed to examine the various options available and come up with a preferred option to allow the project to move ahead. We needed to keep in mind that the finished system will be released as an open-source package under some form of public licence (as agreed by Council in 2005) so the counting method should be one that is recognisable to those in the community that might wish to pick up the package.

The Committee defined the required criteria of the system to:

      1. Aim to always get a result

      2. Obtain a fair result

      3. Be difficult to game

      4. Be as easy to understand (as possible)

After discussion the Committee agreed on using a “majoritarian” system that will most closely resemble the system now in use (as far as we can tell). Nick agreed to write up the expected structure in a way that will allow the Committee to evaluate it for correctness before any programming work is carried out on the counting part of the system.

  1. Confidentiality of documents

The Committee was asked to examine the issue of confidentiality of document handling by Councillors. The Committee had a solid discussion on this point and unanimously agreed that, while Council has a presumption that all our papers are public, INZ will have a long-term issue if we cannot guarantee confidentiality of documents when the information we receive is so labelled, because the level of trust in INZ by external parties will be eroded and then we can expect that useful information passed to the Society will diminish.

The Committee believe that Councillors agree to take on the required ethical standards by agreeing to serve on Council.

There are numerous references to the ethics required of persons taking on the responsibilities of joining governance bodies but it is worth noting the statement of relevance contained in the INZ Governance Policy which is available at

(Old site)

http://www.internetnz.net.nz/public/committee-reports/ctte-exec/ac030404inz-governance-policy.pdf

(New site)

http://www.internetnz.net.nz/pdfs/proceedings/ctte/exec/archive/ac030404inz-governance-policy.pdf

and includes the following statement:

“1.5 CODE OF ETHICS AND PROPER PRACTICE

The Council is committed to ethical conduct in all areas of its responsibilities and authority.

Accordingly,

Members of the Council as individuals will:

  1. act honestly and in good faith at all times in the best interests of InternetNZ

  2. carry out their duties in a lawful and business-like manner and ensure that InternetNZ carries out its business likewise

  3. avoid conflicts of interests in as far as this is possible and where such conflicts arise, will act within the terms of the Council’s Conflict of Interests policy as set out in this document

  4. attend Council and sub-group meetings and devote sufficient time to preparation for Council meetings to allow for full and appropriate participation in the Council’s decision making

  5. observe the confidentiality of non-public information acquired by them in their role as Council members, and not disclose confidential information that might be harmful to InternetNZ

  6. interact with the Council and staff in a positive and constructive manner

  7. not do anything that in any way denigrates InternetNZ or harms its image.”

  1. Other business

One item of other business was discussed, a request for information concerning various Constitutional clauses. The information has now been researched and the requested information forwarded on.

The meeting closed at 2:55.

Chris Streatfield

Chair, Governance and Constitutional Committee.

Recommendations:

That this report be received.


    INFORMATION POINT: There are several different types of system for counting preferential voting in use. There are several “quota” formulae versions including “Hare”, “Droop” , “Imperiali” and “Meek” (a variation on Droop used occasionally in NZ) and also majoritarian (my term) which in one of its forms is pretty much the counting method used up to now in the INZ voting system. More detail on these can be supplied if requested.

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