WDDM Home DISCUSSION ON HOW TO PROMOTE DIRECT (TRUE) DEMOCRACY

WDDM Forum : WDDM Membership Guidelines

Forum for the discussion of the WDDM organizational structure and the development of the membership guidelines 
Goto Thread: PreviousNext
Goto: Forum ListMessage List• New Topic • Search • Log In
How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: MiKolar (IP Logged)
Date: May 27, 2006 09:58PM

We should finally try to make a FULL TRANSITION TO FORUM in these discussions,
AND MODERATOR WOULD ONLY COACH US (FOCUS US) BY E-MAIL TO ONE TOPIC AT A TIME.


I PROPOSE THAT AFTER WE MAKE DECISION ON THE MEMBERSHIP DOCUMENT (AND ON ANY FURTHER
DOCUMENT after that), WE WILL PLACE IT'S FINAL VERSION IN THE FORUM, OR WIKI, OR
ARCHIVE, OR OTHER PLACE (to be decided) WHERE CURRENTLY VALID RULES WILL ALL BE IN
ONE PLACE. THEN DELETE ALL THE INTERMEDIATE VERSIONS FROM THE FORUM/WIKI TO AVOID
CONFUSION, OR PACK IT INTO A DEPOSITORY IN THE ARCHIVE, AND MOVE ONTO THE NEXT ITEM
TO BE DISCUSSED/DECIDED.

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: BrEggum (IP Logged)
Date: May 28, 2006 11:13AM

I agree Mirek.


I would also make "new topics" a responsibility of the Moderator. That way the same topics with different names would be eliminated. A person wanting a "new topic" could ask the Moderator for it.


BrEggum

Bruce Eggum Wisconsin USA
www.doinggovernment.com


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: MiKolar (IP Logged)
Date: May 28, 2006 08:45PM

OK, I can deny all except the moderator to start a New topic in the Internal matters forums. It may actually make the discussions more focused.


Does everybody agree? If there are no objectiosn, I'll do the change in a day or two.

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: EricLim (IP Logged)
Date: May 29, 2006 02:23AM

It is a good idea that the moderator directs the members to the appropriate topic for discussion but members must be free to start a new thread. A new thread may be necessary to organize a sub-topic for the discussion.


Any out-of-topic thread could be removed by the moderator to the appropriate topic.


Is "New Topic" here the same as a new thread?

Best Regards
Eric Lim


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: MiKolar (IP Logged)
Date: June 01, 2006 12:58PM

EricLim Wrote:
> Is "New Topic" here the same as a new thread?


Yes, it is.

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: BrEggum (IP Logged)
Date: June 01, 2006 01:58PM

To many different "Terms" for me to keep straight.


In WDDM Forum we have different titles of topics:
Forms
General Discussion Folder etc.
Than in the:
Internal WDDM Discussion Folder
There are "sub topics" such as:
WDDM Structure
Financials
WDDM Goals


It is these "sub topics" I was referring to, which the moderator should assign and if people wanted a new sub topic they would ask the moderator to post it. This way the moderator could keep the topics ordered and appropriately grouped.


The "new topic" within the sub-topic of course would be up to the user. Sometimes it is unclear which "topic" or "sub-topic" to use.


Perhaps a better understanding (for me) of how the topics are catagorized? BrEggum

Bruce Eggum Wisconsin USA
www.doinggovernment.com


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: MiKolar (IP Logged)
Date: June 01, 2006 02:47PM

Yes, there may arise some confusion here. I'll try to explain below:


> In WDDM Forum we have different titles of topics:


> Forums - a single forum that can hold many threads (topics) - new Forum can be made of moved somewhere else only by the Administrator


> General Discussion Folder etc. - folder that can hold several forums (see above)


> Than in the:
> Internal WDDM Discussion Folder --- that's another folder containing forums
> There are "sub topics" such as: ---- these are all forums (same as News etc.)
> WDDM Structure
> Financials
> WDDM Goals
>
> It is these "sub topics" I was referring to, which
> the moderator should assign and if people wanted a
> new sub topic they would ask the moderator to post
> it. This way the moderator could keep the topics
> ordered and appropriately grouped. ---- yes, these forums can be made by administrato only



>
> The "new topic" within the sub-topic of course --- New Topics creates a new thread
> would be up to the user. Sometimes it is unclear --- it is, so I won't change it
> which "topic" or "sub-topic" to use.

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: BrEggum (IP Logged)
Date: June 01, 2006 03:21PM

Thanks for the clarification Mirek,
BrEggum

Bruce Eggum Wisconsin USA
www.doinggovernment.com


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: CommonOne (IP Logged)
Date: June 04, 2006 02:19PM

Hi all,


Mirek, the website is shaping up beautifully. Let’s continue the effort to simplify and strengthen it.


I’m pretty confused by all this talk about “membership” categories and “rules and regulations”. It is my understanding that WDDM is nothing more than an internet discussion group, and has always been nothing more than an internet discussion group whose apparent mission is to promote the cause of Direct Democracy. Yes, on occasion, some participants of the group have met in the real world to discuss ways to further the mission, but it is also my understanding that these efforts have, for the most part, not been very productive for WDDM.


To the best of my knowledge, WDDM has always been an informal “association” of people, it has never been a legal entity, nor has it ever had requirements for membership or charged membership fees. Therefore, to consider any of us who have participated in these discussions or “conferences” as a “member” is a wrong description, for we have truly been no more than “participants” in these events.


And if we are truly to be democratic, then anyone wishing to join us in our discussions, or conventions, should be free to do so on an equal basis—without having to undergo examination by the other participants. The argument that those who discussed first should have the right to examine the qualifications of those who follow is an invalid argument. An interest in DD in the hopes of making a better world for people should be the only requirement necessary for participation in our events.


As far as distinguishing between “productive” and “passive” members, I cannot speak of those times prior to my joining the discussions. I’m sure that all the original participants had high hopes for the WDDM concept. But since then, the only associates whom I would consider “productive” in the true sense of the word have been Mirek, who has expended untold amounts of time (and I’m sure some financial support) to produce and maintain the website, and Jiri, who has been doing an incredible job producing the newsletter, and was the driving force behind the Third WDDM Conference in Prague. I’ll add George Sagi’s name to this list as he was the first one in the group with whom I had extensive email correspondence, so I know that he tried very hard to make something more of WDDM than a mere discussion group.


If my viewpoint is valid, and I’d be willing to bet the house it is, where does WDDM go from here. It’s senseless to burden ourselves with “membership categories and requirements” when we don’t yet have an organization which people can join and become members. And by this I mean a real world organization that would utilize a membership fee to raise funds, and officers and directors to carry on the business of WDDM. These are the steps that would help us gain the capabilities with which to begin doing the necessary things we must do, if we are to accomplish anything in this lifetime, and the recognition from the those organizations and individuals most likely to aid us.


I have said what I have to say.


Lee


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: BrEggum (IP Logged)
Date: June 04, 2006 07:50PM

Dear Lee,


WDDM was not intended to be a discussion group, that is wheat CICDD is. I realize why you thought it was a discussion group, that is what was wrong with it.


WDDM has tried to become a real orginization since 2000. That is the work we are doing now. We need membership and other documents. We need officers and infrastructure. We need active people to do this who can make decisions and implement the reqired procedures.


That is why we are recruiting a active bunch of WDDM members who have authority to accomplish organizing the Organization.


I refer you to these documents.


Organization Greece
Dear Bruce,
there are two ways to establish a non profit organization in Greece and a third informal choice, as we exist since June 2000, just after the 2nd Int. Congress of D.D., having finished its works in Delphi, Greece.
First, we may establish a non profit Association, asking for a kind of approval from the Court of the seat (Athens, as decided) after a discussion of our relative application , made by a 3 to 5 member Comittee. (Do you think that I should put the names and addresses of the recipients of this message? Please send me then details and your type of Signatures).
Such an attempt has been done (registered officially before the same Court in Athens, since year 2000, signed in the name of the former Executive Comittee of WDDM- Ted Becker, Jiri Polak, G. Sagi and me- but there was no final discussion of that application, since we never finished our Chapter-Articles of Association). Therefore we have to finish this Chapter first, that has to be signed by 20 natural persons at least,presenting it before the above Court in order to have an official Association, under the Greek Law.The cost of the whole procedure (of course without lawyers' remuneration that this work is an offer of me to the WDDM) can be 800-1000 Euros, plus the necessary publications of the Court decision in a newspaper that has a cost more expensive for bigger papers.
Our other choice is to make a non profit Company, even with a Chapter signed by two perons at least, but we have to follow rules for Administration, taxation and peronal responsibilities of the persons that sign it, which make this form not suitable for WDDM principles and Structure. The cost is a bit cheaper than the Association's cost.
The alternative is what we call legally " Union of Persons" under the relative Constitution's Clause, that may be unofficial, without typical licences from Authorities . It then has to prove its existence practically (de facto) through publicised documents, as printed pages of our site etc. That's the way we exist as WDDM since year 2000, although I think that we are now mature enough to proceed with the first choice, when we finish our Articles of Association and have the signatures of 20 ordinary members.
Of course WDDM may be represented in the meantime and temporarily by our Greek NGO "Forum for Citizens' Democracy" or by our Political DD Party ("European Sympoliteia,Direct Democracy"), as it happens now temporarily with our logo, borrowed from these entities, until we change it after the International Competition for our new logo, that Lee proposed in Prague last September.
Please let me have all your answers and choices to the above alternatives, soon.


George L. Kokkas


This is the basic requirements for licensing non-profit in the USA.
Required Inclusions
Every exempt organization must have an employer identification number (EIN), whether or not it has any employees.
If your organization does not have an EIN, your application for recognition of exemption should include a completed Form SS-4, Application for Employer Identification Number.
Organizing documents. Each application for exemption must be accompanied by a conformed copy of your organization's Articles of Incorporation (and the Certificate of Incorporation, if available), Articles of Association, Trust Indenture, Constitution, or other enabling document. If the organization does not have an organizing document, it will not qualify for exempt status.
Bylaws. Bylaws alone are not organizing documents. However, if your organization has adopted bylaws, include a current copy. The bylaws need not be signed if submitted as an attachment.
If your organization's name has been officially changed by an amendment to your organizing instruments, you should also attach a conformed copy of that amendment to your application.
Conformed copy. A conformed copy is a copy that agrees with the original and all amendments to it. If the original document required a signature, the copy should either be signed by a principal officer or, if not signed, be accompanied by a written declaration signed by an authorized officer of the organization. With either option, the officer must certify that the document is a complete and accurate copy of the original. A certificate of incorporation should be approved and dated by an appropriate state official.
Every attachment should show your organization's name, address, and EIN. It should also state that it is an attachment to your application form and identify the part and line item number to which it applies.
Do not submit original documents because they become part of the IRS file and cannot be returned.
Description of activities. Your application must include a full description of the purposes and the activities of your organization. When describing the activities in which your organization expects to engage, you must include the standards, criteria, procedures, or other means that your organization adopted or planned for carrying out those activities.
To determine the information you need to provide, you should study the part of this publication that applies to your organization. The appropriate chapter will describe the purposes and activities that your organization must pursue, engage in, and include in your application in order to achieve exempt status.
Often your organization's articles of organization (or other organizing instruments) contain descriptions of your organization's purposes and activities.
Financial data. You must include in your application financial statements showing your receipts and expenditures for the current year and the 3 preceding years (or for the number of years your organization was in existence, if less than 4 years). For each accounting period, you must describe the sources of your receipts and the nature of your expenditures. You must also include a balance sheet for the current year.
If you have not yet begun operations, or have operated for less than 1 year, a proposed budget for 2 full accounting periods and a current statement of assets and liabilities will be acceptable.
Other information. The IRS may require you to provide additional information necessary to clarify the nature of your organization. Some examples are:
" Representative copies of advertising placed,
" Copies of publications, such as magazines,
" Distributed written material used for expressing views on proposed legislation, and
" Copies of leases, contracts, or agreements into which your organization has entered.
[www.irs.gov]


Regards, Bruce

Bruce Eggum Wisconsin USA
www.doinggovernment.com


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: CommonOne (IP Logged)
Date: June 05, 2006 02:57PM

Bruce,


I understand what you say and I know that George Kokkas and a few others have tried to get the group to make such decisions. But it is my perception that the majority of the group prefer merely to discuss the future of WDDM and to concentrate upon their own pet DD projects. If this were not the case, there would have been a real world WDDM organization long ago. And it's not that any of these personal projects aren't important. They obviously are. But to the best of my intuition, none could possibly have the long-range global impact of a functioning real world WDDM.


Lee


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: BrEggum (IP Logged)
Date: June 05, 2006 04:28PM

Dear Lee,
Without going into a detailed history of WDDM past, there were a few important things which kept WDDM from growing. There seemed to be a huge fear of dictators, fascism etc. Those who feared this did not realize the best way to confront these issues was to write specific statues in a Constitution or in the case of WDDM, a Charter. It is also important the people be vigilant. They also seemed to believe that DD meant everyone was FREE! Not so. DD is the community together defining law, zoning, and all the rules for people to live by. Of course there is need for enforcement and courts etc.


This group of “active” members; Eric, George, Mirek, you and myself are developing a structure to begin. First, we need to define members. There were members who never voted, never participated in WDDM business. This is ok, however when you seek a quorum to accomplish something, the inactive invalidate it.


Thus we are seeking to have those who choose to participate, to be in a WDDM group to accomplish those tasks necessary in the WDDM Orig.


To do this we need to separate the active from those who are to busy or choose to simply read WDDM email.


This is the first task.


Once we have an “Executive Committee” or “Active Group” configured, we can than give this body the power to develop WDDM into an Org.


Mirek has developed a superior site for Direct Democracy providing Communication between people and methods to develop DD. However, there is a cost and it will grow as WDDM has more visitors. Than more band width will need to be purchased etc. Thus to continue we need to seek funding. I certainly thank and appreciate all who have provided funds and hours of effort to WDDM to date. It is too much to expect their generosity to continue indefinitely. WDDM should be self supporting.


Another matter is any group, operating without obvious support, is Bush’s wild dream of terrorism. We are well beyond terror! We are at WAR. However Bush has many chasing these organizations that could be a danger to him. (a bit paranoid? Or just a dictator?)


Thus we need to be an “official” organization.


The USA is a fine example of the urgent need for a strong DD.


So Lee, that is what we are doing. We are developing the infrastructure needed to make WDDM an official Organization.


Please bring your expertise and join us in this endeavor.


ATB Bruce

Bruce Eggum Wisconsin USA
www.doinggovernment.com


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message
Re: How to organize the Active Group (ordinary member) work?
Posted by: MiKolar (IP Logged)
Date: June 06, 2006 12:41PM

Lee,
I was slightly confused by this posting of yours. I thought that you are firmly for creating an organization. (Or did you just mean the Educational Organization outside of WDDM?) And so I was trying to help with this goal a little bit by participation in the discussion on the membership structure and the rules.


Personally, I would be happy to continue as an Association for the nearest future.
For the plans to make the WDDM site a hub a democracy resources, this would be sufficient for now.


On the other hand, I see some advantage of being registered and having the possibility to apply to funds as a nonprofit organization.
I give an example: Translations For Progress: [www.translationsforprogress.org] (TfP) - this is another site I programmed from scratch recently. The idea was formulated in the end of last June (2005). I had the first simple version of the site running in the end of August. It has a more or less a single simple purpose (mission), so it was not so difficult to define its rules (by-laws). Now we are already a registered non-profit organization in Massachusetts (Boston). All the registered users of the site are in a sense TfP members, but not exactly in our sense as in WDDM. No complicated membership rules were needed for registration, just statements How the members (users) are registered, they have to except the Terms and Conditions Terms and Conditions, and then there is a statement that they can leave freely when they wish so (how to cease to be a member). And a list of a minimum of Board Members had to be presented for the registration approval (I am formally on the TfP Board, but I was not involved with the details of the registration process at all, I was just doing the programming smiling smiley). We will have to see yet whether the registration help us to get some external funding to help with web site costs, etc.


By the way, I have just registered WDDM as the NGO member of the TfP, and started to seek help there with translating for our site.


So in the beginning we should at least finalize what information we will collect from our WDDM members when they sign the first time.
This form is used [www.world-wide-democracy.net]:
Right now we require there these items:
Username:
Email:
Password (twice):
Real Name:
Relation to Direct Democracy: (max 2500 words)


To this there were suggestions to add:
Country:
Mailing address (optional):


And to rename the box "Relation to Direct Democracy" to something else, or split it in two ("Why do you want to become a WDDM member" and "any other comments").
I would personally keep this just one box/item, and rename it to something like:
"Any comments you consider relevant to your interest in WDDM (max 2500 words; no HTML elements; leave an empty line to start a new paragraph; all this will be the initial content of you WDDM Viki home page)"
or alternatively:
"Any comments on your relation to, or interest in Direct Democracy, or anything you consider relevant to your entry into WDDM (max 2500 words; no HTML elements; leave an empty line to start a new paragraph; all this will be the initial content of you WDDM Viki home page)"


The point is to formulate it so that we do not scare of the people who just heard about DD and want to learn more. Those who were already active in DD elsewhere will definitely put it down even if we don't ask them directly. So please hep me with formulating this. I want to have something that will not need to be changed very often. Once we have this final formulation on the initial membership form, I can have it translated in all other languages (using TfP of course).

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]


Options: Reply To This Message • Quote This Message


Get Firefox!       Powered by Phorum.       PHP