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Eric, I agree that I wouldn't want to have an organization that existed to govern all things Code4lib - but I don't think that's what's on the table here. What I'm hearing is a call for a persistent entity that can do things like sign contracts and hold funds from year to year, pursuant to planning a conference. The governing documents of that entity could *and should* be quite narrowly construed to avoid giving that entity powers of community governance or policy statement. Would such an entity inevitably have its own insiders and outsiders? Yes...but that is hardly different from the status quo, which very much has insiders and outsiders; they are simply not conveniently labeled, which means they can be hard to identify (for insiders as much as for outsiders). If you haven't read "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" yet, I commend it to you. That said, I am quite fond of the merrily anarchic nature of this library collective, and I would want to see the devils in the details of governing docs before I made up my mind. And I find I have a sense of humor about how awful it apparently is for things to have presidents. On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 5:09 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > On Jun 7, 2016, at 10:53 PM, Mike Giarlo <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > >>> I'm also interested in investigating how to formalize Code4Lib as an > >>> entity, for all of the reasons listed earlier in the thread… > >> > >> -1 because I don’t think the benefits will outweigh the emotional and > bureaucratic expense. We already have enough rules. > > > > Can you say more about what you expect "the emotional and bureaucratic > expense" to be? > > Bureaucratic and emotional expenses include yet more committees and > politics. Things will happen increasingly slowly. Our community will be > less nimble and somewhat governed by outside forces. We will end up with > presidents, vice-presidents, secretaries, etc. Increasingly there will be > “inside” and “outside”. The inside will make decisions and the outside > won’t understand and feel left out. That is what happens when formalization > take place. > > The regional conferences are good things. I call them franchises. The > annual meeting does not have to be a big deal, and the smaller it is, the > less financial risk there will be. Somebody will always come forward. It > will just happen. > > — > Eric Lease Morgan > -- Andromeda Yelton Board of Directors/Vice-President Elect, Library & Information Technology Association: http://www.lita.org http://andromedayelton.com @ThatAndromeda <http://twitter.com/ThatAndromeda>