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

Mon Mar 27 08:56:16 EDT 2017

We think we are going to shrink government and we can't even clean out our clutter without rules upon rules and endless debate.

Daniel Hayes
LNC At Large Members

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 27, 2017, at 6:40 AM, Ken Moellman <lpky at mu-net.org> wrote:
> 
> Destruction of documents without LNC permission would have been strictly prohibited under the version of the HPC motion that was originally brought forward.  I'm just sayin'.
> 
>> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 12:19 AM, Caryn Ann Harlos <carynannharlos at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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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