[Lnc-business] Email Ballot 2017-06: Move Archive Records to CO
Brett Bittner
brett.bittner at lp.org
Wed Mar 29 20:34:36 EDT 2017
I vote Aye on email ballot 2017-06.
Brett
**This message sent from my phone. Please excuse any typos.
On Mar 29, 2017 20:31, "Caryn Ann Harlos" <carynannharlos at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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