[Lnc-business] Email Ballot 2017-06: Move Archive Records to CO

Mon Mar 27 00:19:41 EDT 2017

Nothing would be unilaterally discarded by me.

I do not believe the HPC has that authority.

A detailed culling recommendation would be given.

On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 5:35 PM Starchild <sfdreamer at earthlink.net> wrote:

>
> Alicia,
>
> If there were an amendment or second motion that none of the materials to
> be sent to Colorado be discarded without an elected or appointed member of
> the party leadership gives the okay, would that  allay your concerns? Or
> perhaps a motion/amendment saying certain categories of things can't be
> discarded, period? Having seen the kind of stuff that's sometimes been left
> behind and thrown away after LP conventions – current outreach materials,
> unused office supplies, etc. – not to mention stuff being deleted from our
> website, old meeting minutes and other important records apparently having
> been thrown out by people at various times, etc., I share your concern that
> things might get thrown out which would better be saved.
>
> Where we may possibly see things differently is that I don't perceive
> there being a greater risk of this occurring in Colorado than in
> Alexandria. The discarding of minutes and other important past materials
> presumably took place in the D.C. area. More recently, Wes mentioned in a
> recent message that he discarded some stuff, and although I trust there
> were no minutes among those materials, there wasn't a lot of detail
> provided about precisely what they *did* include, and I can't help
> wondering whether anything was discarded that I personally might have kept.
> I might have the same concern upon hearing of stuff discarded in Colorado,
> of course, but I wouldn't be any *more* concerned.
>
> Love & Liberty,
>                                 ((( starchild )))
> At-Large Representative, Libertarian National Committee
>                               (415) 625-FREE
>                                 @StarchildSF
>
>
>
> On Mar 26, 2017, at 2:16 PM, Alicia Mattson wrote:
>
> The discussion on this thread paints the motion in a very different light
> for me.  I want to take a step back and put this in context.
>
> The motion adopted by email ballot to create this committee included the
> following scope description:
>
> "The LNC establishes a Historic Preservation Committee to help preserve
> and publish historical documents of the party and to manage LPedia."
>
> The goal is to preserve and publish things of historical value.
>
> This motion suggests that the newly-requested funds will be used:
>
> "to budget an additional $5,000 (budget line 90) to relocate the
>
> historical records in the Duke Street basement and in the off-site
>
> storage facility to a location in Colorado..."
>
> That to me sounds like the materials in question are of historical value,
> and it thus warrants the expenditure to preserve them.
>
> What we're learning, though, is that possibly the vast majority of this
> material is trash, and we're paying thousands of dollars to ship trash to
> Colorado to be thrown away there.
>
> This is really more of a document destruction project than a historical
> preservation project, though along the way it will likely find a few
> historical documents worth preserving.
>
> We created a Historic Perservation Committee, rather than a Basement
> Cleanout Committee, and they're very different tasks.
>
> I would be comfortable with volunteers in Colorado taking things deemed to
> have historic value and scanning them for preservation, or making them
> available for silent auction fundraising, etc.
>
> I am not comfortable with volunteers in Colorado who have no experience in
> operations of our headquarters essentially making decisions about what
> documents get thrown away.
>
> The reason I spent a day in the Watergate dungeon (I think it was in the
> fall of 2011) digging through that material is because I was looking for
> some records that should have been preserved in perpetuity, but *someone
> who didn't understand their importance apparently threw them out*. They
> actually had very high value for legal reasons.
>
> As pretty as it sounds to have a team of volunteers in the birthplace of
> the LP building historical archives, a person's Colorado residence doesn't
> grant them magical knowledge of what business records ought to be kept and
> which ones ought to be thrown away.
>
> I realize that you say that the LNC will ultimately decide which things
> get tossed, but the quality of the LNC's decision depends heavily on the
> description of the records we are given.  If a volunteer describes to us
> that a box contains miscellaneous receipts, it's one thing if it's
> 15-year-old receipts for office supplies that have long since been used up,
> but it's another if the receipts are for equipment still in use today and
> maybe still under warranty.  If a volunteer describes to us that a box
> contains old email correspondence with a state chair, it's one thing if the
> conversation was, "I look forward to seeing you at the convention", but
> it's another thing if the conversation was relaying facts about a situation
> that is the subject of a lawsuit.
>
> If the person looking at the records doesn't really understand the context
> of the records, how can they give us the key information we need to make an
> informed decision about which ones to throw away?
>
> This is not a project that should be undertaken by people with no
> understanding of our party operations.
>
> There may also be old employment records with sensitive personnel
> information, social security numbers, etc., and those shouldn't just be
> passed around among random volunteers.
>
> I have no objection to paying for the committee chair to make a trip to
> the storage facility, spend a few days sorting through it to find items of
> historical value, and then shipping those 10 boxes to Colorado for further
> processing.  That is within the function of a Historic Preservation
> Committee.
>
> I do have objection to shipping our trash-mixed-with-important-records
> across the country for people who don't understand what is valuable and
> what isn't to give us vague descriptions which will be the basis of
> uninformed decisions for destroying our records.  This document destruction
> task is not what I had in mind when the Historic Preservation Committee was
> created.
>
> For several years our outside auditors have been urging us to adopt
> document retention policies (and also whistleblower policies, but that's
> another subject).  I think it was two terms ago near the end of that term
> that the Audit Committee proposed some starter language to try to get the
> ball rolling, but the LNC has not yet implemented anything.
>
> At minimum we need to establish how long certain records are to be kept
> such as employment records, financial records, membership certifications,
> and other categories.  These can be important to keep for legal reasons,
> for FEC compliance, etc.  Even after we make those policy decisions, I
> think the document maintenance has to be done by knowledgeable insiders
> rather than miscellaneous volunteers.
>
> -Alicia
>
>
>
>
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