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

Mon Mar 27 23:36:07 EDT 2017

Hi Alicia,

My recommendations will be primarily about duplicates.  I do believe I am
experienced enough to determine a duplicate.  I also undertook a similar
(obviously smaller scale but in principle the same) project already in
Colorado (http://www.lpcolorado.org/archives).

The rest would be done via inventory and in consultation with more
experienced Party members.

I do not have experience in years, but I have experience in diving in more
deeply than persons with twenty years of experience have done.  Further CO
has a wide breath of available persons to volunteer.

Right  now there is no danger of anyone's experience because it simply
isn't being done, and unless another person with the passion I have for the
topic appears, it likely will not in any forseeable future.  It hasn't so
far.

I respectfully submit that making recommendations is not complicated and I
believe I have proven my understanding on historical artifacts.

-Caryn Ann

On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 9:26 PM, Alicia Mattson <agmattson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Starchild,
>
> My concerns are not about the city in which the analysis is done, but
> about the depth of experience of the person analyzing the contents in order
> to characterize them for the decision maker(s).
>
> -Alicia
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 4:34 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
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Lnc-business mailing list
>> Lnc-business at hq.lp.org
>> http://hq.lp.org/mailman/listinfo/lnc-business_hq.lp.org
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Lnc-business mailing list
>> Lnc-business at hq.lp.org
>> http://hq.lp.org/mailman/listinfo/lnc-business_hq.lp.org
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lnc-business mailing list
> Lnc-business at hq.lp.org
> http://hq.lp.org/mailman/listinfo/lnc-business_hq.lp.org
>
>

-- 
*In Liberty,*
*Caryn Ann Harlos*
Region 1 Representative, Libertarian National Committee (Alaska, Arizona,
Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Washington) - Caryn.Ann.
Harlos at LP.org <Caryn.Ann.Harlos at LP.org>
Communications Director, Libertarian Party of Colorado
<http://www.lpcolorado.org>
Colorado State Coordinator, Libertarian Party Radical Caucus
<http://www.lpradicalcaucus.org>
Chair, LP Historical Preservation Committee

A haiku to the Statement of Principles:
*We defend your rights*
*And oppose the use of force*
*Taxation is theft*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://hq.lp.org/pipermail/lnc-business/attachments/20170327/45ccf09d/attachment-0002.html>