thirdcrank wrote:In a national organisation, it would be unfair to the majority of the membership if it was only possible to vote in person at what would inevitably be for them a distant location.
There are things that can be done to reduce that unfairness, such as using a vaguely central location and holding the AGM in the afternoon, to give maximum time to travel there before and home after - but CTC's was in one corner of the country at 10am, almost exactly the opposite.
thirdcrank wrote:The majority giving an undirected proxy to the chair is rational, in that if they weren't satisfied with the individual somebody else would be in the chair. It is, of course, difficult to differentiate between satisfaction and apathy.
Isn't it pretty clearly apathy when only 2500ish of 60000+ use their vote, even as an undirected proxy?
thirdcrank wrote:With regard to Cuk, it's now a charity and many of the predictions made by the "No" faction are coming to pass. All water under the bridge. The die is cast. The democratic vote was for conversion to a charity and that's pretty much it because there's no mechanism for undoing that.
I'm pretty sure it can be undone but it would be fairly painful because CTC would effectively restart with no non-charitable funds initially: start New-CTC Ltd to accept memberships and buy the shares of the current CTC and its subsidiaries, then
merge the current CTC with CDF or operate it as a CTC Charitable Foundation subsidiary of New-CTC, similar to how CDF used to be.
There isn't really any need to do it, either. Most of the problems could be fixed while remaining a charity. Nothing in charity law requires a committee vetting trustee candidates or that you don't inform members about how the democracy works or that you make AGMs awkward to attend and largely impotent, for example. The problem isn't the charity registration.
thirdcrank wrote:An undirected proxy gives the proxy the ability to respond to amendments submitted at the meeting while a directed proxy is a vote one way or the other on motions as they appear on the agenda.
That distinction rarely matters in practice in CTC as far as I can tell - it seems very rare for the AGM to change the chair's opinion on any vote.