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

Caryn Ann Harlos carynannharlos at gmail.com
Wed Mar 29 20:30:52 EDT 2017


To supplement the other update and relevant to this motion: I now have two
volunteers willing to dedicate an entire week block of time if the records
are in the Denver area to work on the project.  This is with minimal word
of mouth from person(s) who read the LNC list.  I believe I would get
several regular crews.  LPCO already has a commitment to its history
(unfortunately some records list due to past neglect prior to my time and
were soiled by vermin).  I am a prolific volunteer recruiter when I need
them.

-Caryn Ann



On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 3:19 PM Caryn Ann Harlos <carynannharlos at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Joshua, any historical work with a budget is going to require
> prioritization which requires knowing what we have.  If it were just the
> records in the basement, that would not be an issue (another volunteer I
> found just spent two more days there - total volunteer time on the project
> now totals likely over a 100 hours between inventory work and LPedia
> database fix issues - IOW significant volunteer has already been expended -
> we have been effective).  It is the storage facility records that are the
> issue.  If they remain there, one possible avenue to keep staff uninvolved
> as much as possible is to grant me the key to designate to a certain core
> group of volunteers in the area to be determined.  I am confident that
> whatever is decided, we will make the most effective, cheapest, least
> intrusive means possible.  As I said, I will have to spend vacation time in
> VA this summer if they are not moved.  I do not require any staff
> oversight, but that money could go to the Party rather than Southwest and
> Marriot.
>
> And no, this year that expense will not grow (and next year is a different
> budget discussion).  I am convinced it is too high by at least $1000
> (unless salary is way more than I figure in my head - which of course would
> be a confidential discussion).  And I want to remind everyone that I
> already raised nearly $1200 and promised an additional $1500 if the move
> was approved.  So if I am right (and I am pretty convinced I am) that the
> $9000 figure is correct, taking away the pledge and the amount raised, we
> are at $6800.  Which is only $1800 more than the LNC expected already to
> come out of the budget (and most certainly money will be raised toward
> that) in additional to the free professional labor.  Putting aside that
> this is my project and I have a bias, we need to be supporting these
> volunteer initiative small projects.  I could wax long about that, but I
> will save it to not bore everyone to death with this post.  But you are
> right, we have spent more discussing a relatively trivial amount with a
> potential result of volunteered time, product, and good will way beyond the
> amount.  For once, I am nearly talked out - miracle of miracle.  I have
> never tried so hard to give away so many hours of my professional time over
> several years.
>
> I don't think there is much btw that falls in some third category. I do
> think that is somewhat of a false premise.  I broadly went through records
> in the facility and it was not that category (membership slips should be
> scanned IMHO - whether they are published is a different decision).  There
> are filing cabinets in the basement which do, but which have always been
> outside our scope.
>
> I find it interesting that it seems there is a critique that the original
> scanning budget has not been spent - it seems my prudence and caution is
> being used as a point of suspicion rather than good stewardship which
> rather reminds me of government budgeting.  I could have spent it in a
> week.  I am determined to squeeze it for every penny but it seems that this
> suggestion would have had a lot less discussion if I were irresponsible.  I
> did get some advice to just spent it right away being cautioned about this
> very thing.  I don't operate that way.  I treat OPM (other people's money)
> as sacred.  I have spent my own money on misc items rather than nickel or
> diming this.  Volunteers have spent days from their vacation time - neither
> of them lived by HQ, one was further away in VA and the other was all the
> way from AZ.
>
> PS:  I have a volunteer willing to commit a full week of time to assisting
> with these records,, if they are moved to CO.
>
> -Caryn Ann
>
> On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 12:48 PM, Joshua Katz <planning4liberty at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Well, let me say this:  the debate on this motion has entirely changed my
> view on the questions involved.  One thing I am gleaning from the debate,
> though, is that different people are talking about entirely different
> issues and concerns, and several of those issues are not well-framed enough
> to be answered in a yes/no manner.  For a while, I thought the debate was
> largely off-track because it was getting into the weeds, but now I realize
> that some of those weeds are LNC concerns, and others, despite ideally not
> being LNC concerns, have become such due to a lack of other governance
> mechanisms.  I will attempt here to lay out what I see as the issues being
> discussed - largely independently - and suggest that the question be
> narrowed.
>
> *The Stuff*
>
> We have piles of stuff, is what I'm gathering.  We passed a motion a while
> ago, creating the Historical Committee, which I think was implicitly
> premised on the idea that the stuff falls into two groups:  garbage, and
> things we wish to preserve for historical value.  At least, that was my
> implicit premise.  Now we're finding, though, that there's a third group:
> things we wish to preserve for legal/business purposes.  This suggests to
> me that our handling of the previous motion might not have been sufficient
> because of this faulty premise.  So we're left with a broad question:  how
> to handle all this stuff.  I think a lot of us thought our previous motion
> would take care of that, but perhaps it will not if this third category
> exists.
>
> *Financial Considerations*
>
> This is what I originally thought this motion was all about - spending
> money.  In particular, it seems to me that this motion is based on the idea
> that the money we previously allocated was not sufficient.  This gives me
> independent concerns:  if the expected cost of a project doubles in a
> matter of weeks, experience shows us that it is likely to continue rising.
> I also would like to know how we learned this - since none of the
> originally allocated money has been spent, and the proposed increase is
> exactly the amount allocated, why can't the allocated money be spent to do
> this?  While much discussion has been about the proposed object, the motion
> seems to me only to authorize money, and to take for granted that the
> moving can be done by staff as long as the money is there.
>
> Now, assuming there's some other use for the original $5k, I don't think
> what Wes has told us suggests that we can do this project for either $5k or
> $10k.  I think it suggests that the cost of the project is (at least) $10k,
> once staff time is included, as it should be.  A functionally allocated
> budget would have made this clear, whereas with our current budgeting
> procedures it has to come out in discussion and remain a little fuzzy, but
> that's how I'm reading it.  We can spend the additional $5k in cash, or we
> can spend it in lost staff time.  That brings up a new question, then -
> since we approved the project at $5k, do we still think it is worth doing
> at $10k?  I think that's perfectly well-framed to be answered with a yes/no
> decision.  However, what is less clear is what happens if we say no.  One
> option is that things would remain at status quo, and we'd continue paying
> for storage space.  Another is to throw everything out.  There are probably
> other options, too.
>
> *The Value of Things in Storage*
>
> Focusing for a moment on the items of business/legal significance, I think
> that, if a clean-up project does not proceed, they might as well be in the
> trash.  It is extremely unlikely that things can be found when needed, and
> it would be healthier, when such a concern comes up, to be able to say
> cheerfully "yep, it's gone," than to have a vague notion that it may exist
> in a large pile of stuff, buried under furniture.
>
> Turning to the historical items, I confess to being less interested in
> these than others are, but I take the result of the vote to suggest that we
> find it important, and so we're unlikely to think they're worth preserving
> at $5k, but worth throwing out if it would cost $10k.  In the grand scheme
> of things, $5k is not much money, and it's believed that there are
> donations available to support much of this.  In my mind, though, such
> donations are currently speculative - and I can speculate that costs will
> continue rising.  So let's ignore both speculations and assume we'll be
> spending the money out of what's currently in our budget - it's still
> rather small and not worth much of the time spent discussing it.  Heck,
> it's the amount we let the chair spend freely - which raises one possible
> solution.  More generally, it raises the idea that we should be freer with
> allocating budgets to projects without involving ourselves in the questions
> of how the money is spent.  Personally, I find it baffling that we turn
> over the vast majority of our budget to staff, yet insist on weird control
> mechanisms for small portions - putting the most control on money to be
> spent by committees, largely populated by board members.  I have no idea
> why we single out budget access, for instance, for EC control (why not, at
> least, control by the people directing ballot access?), but leave half the
> budget in Compensation.  But then, I don't understand many things about the
> world.
>
> *Budgetary Impact*
>
> That said, and I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, when donations
> are available for a given project, it is not always clear if they will
> increase total revenue, or simply be taken out of other giving the same
> people might otherwise have planned.  I suspect the answer is somewhere in
> the middle - a $10k project, fully funded by donations, will not cost us
> $10k, but also will not cost us $0, all things considered.
>
> *Why is There a Pile of Stuff?*
>
> I think Wes has well explained this one - people are afraid to throw
> things out.  A few years ago, I was elected Secretary of my fire
> department.  I went through old minutes and found that all correspondence
> was there - i.e. Christmas cards, invitations to Climb for Life, for
> decades.  This doesn't make it particularly easy to do the project I was
> engaged in - no one had kept records of standing rules, so I was attempting
> to reconstruct them from old minutes.  (A fun story for anyone who says "I
> don't see what's wrong with including discussion in the minutes" or who
> fails to see why it is important to record the actual language of the
> motion.)  Anyway, with a custom going back decades, it's hard to be the one
> who decides to break it.  The solution is a document retention policy,
> which we should come up with.  I will move in Pittsburgh that we appoint a
> committee to recommend one.
>
> *How to Throw Things Out*
>
> Although we have agreed that the LNC will make this decision, based on
> this discussion, I am questioning the wisdom of that move.  I think if a
> committee is going through this material, and if we have adopted such a
> policy, that committee should be free to throw things out within that
> policy.  Currently, as the Secretary notes, making these calls would take a
> good amount of expertise with the specifics of the materials.  With a
> document retention plan in place, I don't think it will.  I think it would
> be crazy for the LNC to make document by document decisions, personally.
> Let's set some rules about what sorts of things we want to keep, and then
> let volunteers have at it.
>
> *Purpose of Historical Committee*
>
> As the Secretary notes, we appointed a historical committee, not a
> clean-up committee.  If it turns out that cleaning up is necessary before
> the historical work can be done, we need to decide if the historical
> committee is the right committee for that purpose, or if something else
> needs to be done first.
>
> Joshua A. Katz
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 10:36 PM, Caryn Ann Harlos <
> carynannharlos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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> --
> *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*
>
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>
> --
> *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*
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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