It’s not ideal to assume an elected office under such circumstances, but assume it I must. Accordingly, I’ve made some committee appointments, thus forming my new administration. It will be a brief administration, however, as my term of office will be up for election in less than three months. My intention was to run for the office in April anyway, so maybe I should just think of this as a bit of a head start on my first term.

This new business name and location represent, in every respect, a smooth continuation of my business, which remains organized as a sole proprietorship under the same owner and management. Existing and prospective clients can rest assured that they will experience the same standard of professional excellence under the Raplyn Consulting brand as they have come to expect from Dan Lynch, PRP. Additionally, client service is more responsive as I no longer need to balance the needs of my business clients with those of my former full-time employer.

A new business name of course requires a new logo and new branding practices, and those are in the process of being implemented on my website and stationery. Also, the textual copy on the website is being updated to reflect the proper voice. The blog, however, will continue to be written in the first person, as it represents the voice of the individual author of each post and not the business as such. The first edition of the long-promised monthly newsletter will be published in early February, with each subsequent edition normally containing a selection of the more interesting blog posts from the preceding month.

I hope that you, my clients, potential clients, colleagues, friends, and family, will benefit from this new arrangement, and will support me in my goal of improving the practice of parliamentary procedure in Toronto, in Ontario, in Canada, and throughout the world—one organization at a time. I look forward to hearing from you.

The new name of my parliamentary business will be Raplyn Consulting. The word “Raplyn” doesn’t mean anything in particular, but was formed by combining some last names within my family. The new logo and stationery were designed by a professional logo design firm, and I think they look quite nice. My website will be relocated to www.raplyn.com and my new e-mail address will be dan@raplyn.com. Everything on the dglynch.com domain will be re-directed seamlessly and for an indefinite period of time.

The main purpose in doing this re-naming and re-branding is to make my business look and feel as professional as it has actually become. Since the middle of October I have been doing this on a full-time basis, and I’d like to make that more obvious. By creating an identity for the business separate from my own personality, I think I’m going in the right direction. The business is still organized as a sole proprietorship; I don’t anticipate any changes on that front in the short term.

There may be a few hiccups as everything gets switched over, and there’s still the small matter of creating the new graphics and copy for the website. However, I hope I will be ready to launch the new business identity before the end of the year. At that point, I will also launch the next phase of my business development program, trying to get my name out into the minds of prospective clients and leveraged networking contacts.

First, your association can resolve to improve the way amendments are handled at both board meetings and general membership meetings. Typically, amendments are shunned by inexperienced members and chairs, because they can be difficult to understood and vote on correctly. Often, the secretary is tasked with figuring out, after the meeting, the exact wording of a motion that was adopted with amendments. However, by carefully using the proper forms of primary and secondary amendment, a deliberative assembly of any size can efficiently and effectively amend any motion in even the most complicated ways. If a chair, or even a member, wants to significantly improve his or her parliamentary skills in a way that will be more helpful, more often, this is definitely an important area to focus on.

Second, your association can resolve to make better use of the various different temporary dispositions available for main motions. These techniques are essential to good deliberative process, and it is a shame that so few non-profit assemblies make optimal use of them. The three most important temporary dispositions are: referral to a committee, postponement to a certain time, and laying on the table. When referring a motion to a committee, the assembly is saying that it is not prepared to make a decision at this time, and would like to have a small break-out group do a study and report back sometime in the future. When postponing a motion to a certain time, which could be later in the meeting or at the next meeting, the assembly is saying that it is not prepared to make a decision at this time, but that it will try again later at a specific pre-scheduled time, without anything special being done in the meantime. And when laying a motion on the table, the assembly is saying that something else urgent has come up that needs to be addressed before the motion can be considered, but that it will return to considering the motion sometime in the current or next meeting, whenever it gets a chance. These three motions, when properly used, can greatly improve the quality of the decisions made by your non-profit association, avoiding the need to make decisions for which the decision-makers are not yet fully ready.

Third, your association can resolve to improve the quality of its minutes, both for board meetings and for general membership meetings. All too often, minutes contain lots of unnecessary content, and exclude essential content. Common things that are included when they shouldn’t be are: attendance records, summaries of officer reports, questions asked and answered, summaries of the content of debate or special presentations, suggestions that were never expressed as motions, secondary motions without continuing effect, and the names of the seconders of motions. On the other hand, some common things that are excluded when they shouldn’t be are: the full numerical results of secret ballot and/or counted votes, and all points of order and appeals, including the reasons for the chair’s rulings. By including the things that should be included, and excluding the things that should be excluded, your non-profit association can greatly improve the quality of its minutes in 2009.

Fourth, your association can resolve to purchase copies of your parliamentary authority for every officer, or at least one copy for the president or chairman. It is a sad reality that many non-profits’ by-laws prescribe that a particular book governs when the by-laws are silent, such as Robert’s Rules of Order or Wainberg’s Society Meetings, but no copy of the book is available when the stuff hits the fan. This book is practically a part of your by-laws, so ideally, everyone who has access to a copy of the by-laws should have access to the book as well—and sadly, very few public libraries can be relied upon to have the correct edition.

Fifth, your association can resolve to seek outside help on questions of parliamentary procedure. For private individuals, and associations with limited financial resources, the official Robert’s Rules of Order message board is a God-send. You can post any question about Robert’s Rules of Order, and it will almost always be answered within minutes, usually by one or more professional parliamentarians volunteering their time and expertise. There are only two draw-backs to this service: it is not actually guaranteed to be accurate (although this is rarely a problem), and it does not go into questions requiring interpretations of your association’s own by-laws and rules. To get around the latter two problems, your association would need to hire a professional parliamentarian.

These five suggested New Year’s resolutions for your non-profit association will help to improve its deliberative process, but, like always, only if they are duly adopted and actually followed throughout the year. And, the responsibility for following a non-profit association’s New Year’s resolutions rests with the members, officers, staff, and consultants like you, who actually care enough about the association and want to see it succeed.

Prorogation is the simultaneous ending of the legislative session of two deliberative assemblies by executive order, without the advice or consent of either. It has an effect similar to adjournment sine die, however the word “adjourn” is not generally used, and the assemblies themselves have no control over the decision. If either the House of Commons or the Senate happen to be sitting when the proclamation is issued, the prorogation is implemented by means of a point of order raised by a minister of the crown, which is in order even while another member has the floor. The Speaker then leaves the chair, without ruling on the point of order, and the members disperse. If a particular house is not sitting at the time the proclamation is issued, it simply does not meet again at the time to which it had previously adjourned, and an extra-cameral notation to that effect is added to the record of the last meeting.

As a result of the prorogation, all unfinished business falls to the ground in both Houses, and all committees are prohibited from meeting. The houses of Parliament do not meet again until such time as they are summoned to Ottawa by proclamation, at which point a new session begins. Some rules exist to expedite certain items of business that were left unfinished during the previous session, but those rules are an exception to the general principle. In the present case, the Governor General issued a second proclamation on the same day, summoning Parliament to meet again on January 26, 2009.

In ordinary assemblies, no person or body has the power of prorogation. Each deliberative assembly has full control over the conduct of its own business, and that includes the decision of when and whether to adjourn and the time to which to adjourn. Often, parliamentarians will see (or hear about) chairmen who believe they have the power to unilaterally adjourn an assembly, but who in reality do not. Only in the case of a fire or riot, or other similarly dangerous situation, can the chair declare a meeting adjourned without the consent of the members.

Although the parliamentary procedure used in ordinary clubs and associations is loosely based on the way Parliament operates, this is one area where the two systems depart considerably. This is important to remember especially now, since the concept of prorogation has become daily front page news in Canada.

Unfortunately, AIP was going through a serious crisis at the time, and as a new member I was treated with complete indifference by management. It was nearly a year before I received my membership card and welcome package, and I never experienced any significant benefits of membership. So, when it came time to renew my dues for the next year, I treated the renewal notice with complete indifference, and my membership lapsed.

With the passage of time, AIP has resolved many of its internal issues, and I’ve decided to rejoin as a member. I plan to pursue AIP’s Certified Parliamentarian, Certified Professional Parliamentarian, and Teacher of Parliamentary Procedure designations, and join the local chapter here in Toronto: the Parliamentary Society of Toronto.

The mark of a true professional is continual training and development, and I hope this new affiliation will help me in that regard. My next major milestone in this project will be writing the CP exam in the first week of June 2009, so I will need to set aside some time between now and then for studying and preparation. I will also need to make sure my required service points are fully documented and up-to-date; fortunately, my practice as a professional parliamentarian provides me with ample opportunity to earn those points.

A confidence motion (or a motion or vote of non-confidence or no confidence) is a motion that, if defeated (or adopted, respectively) would show that the government no longer has enough support in the House of Commons to carry on its political agenda. Usually, a motion of confidence will be a budgetary item, or a piece of legislation that the government considers essential to its continued existence as such. Alternatively, a motion may be moved by the opposition directly expressing a lack of confidence.

Strictly speaking, under the rules of parliamentary procedure, a motion of confidence (or no confidence) has no effect whatsoever, except to express an opinion. However, as a constitutional tradition, this opinion is always acted upon by the Governor General, who will either dissolve parliament and call a general election, or else appoint a new government from among the opposition parties—either one of which is definitely a significant side effect of the motion of confidence.

Unfortunately, many Canadians (and possibly many people from other countries as well) are under the mistaken impression that motions of confidence, or the lack thereof, have similar side effects when applied to the meetings of small voluntary bodies, such as local clubs and non-profit associations. A small-town club has no governor general, nor does it have hundreds of years of constitutional tradition. It has only what is written in its by-laws, and in Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised.

The disciplinary procedures available to most ordinary societies range from the simple to the complex, but in all cases they involve an honest motion to remove the offender from office, rather than relying on the euphemism of “no confidence.” As a result, a number of aspirant coup-masters have been thwarted on a technicality, after giving notice of the wrong motion, and discovering, at their moment of triumph, that they have merely caused the deliberative assembly to express an opinion with no actual effect!

The lesson here is to be careful when drawing analogies between the House of Commons and the ordinary deliberative assembly. While the two may have a great deal in common, it is easy to lose track of the forest for the trees.

At the heart of every non-profit organization is a deliberative assembly or two: a board of directors and/or an active and democratic general membership. Supporting these assemblies are the usual gamut of officers, committees, subcommittees, etc. The rules that govern the proceedings of these assemblies have hundreds of years of history, but that doesn’t mean new ideas can’t be productively used. In fact, there are some key ways that non-profits can use social media to make their internal governance processes more efficient and more effective.

First, the assembly has to join the world of the static web, if it has not yet done so. Most or all of the records of the assembly can be posted online and made accessible to members and/or the general public. This would include notices of meetings, agendas, minutes, by-laws, policies, rules, proposed motions, reports, and supporting material. There is no reason, other than privacy and secrecy, that this information can’t be made conveniently accessible in an online format. Many associations go this far, and then stop—but this is only the beginning.

The next step is to add the ability for members (and maybe others) to comment on and debate the items posted. These discussions can be an aid to the crystallization of opinion, and can make the actual meetings go more efficiently if done well. Ideas can be fielded, questions answered, and time-wasting proposals identified. This discussion cannot replace voting at the meeting, nor should it be used as an excuse to cut off legitimate debate, but the advantages are nevertheless quite strong.

The next stage, beyond mere commenting, is collaboration. Using tools such as wikis and content management systems, committees and other para-deliberative bodies can fluidly propose, amend, and refine their reports and recommendations, without having to meet in person and go through the tedious amendment process, while at the same time maintaining an electronic record of their activities, and having extremely good visibility of their work product. The Wikimedia Foundation uses this process to develop the very successful Wikipedia website.

Still further along the continuum, we encounter the idea of an asynchronous electronic deliberative assembly meeting, wherein the participants actually make motions, debate, and vote by e-mail or using some kind of web interface. This is a new and relatively untested area of parliamentary procedure, but some non-profit organizations, such as the Debian Project, have done it successfully for years.

Some of these ideas, to be implemented fully and faithfully, might require amendments to the by-laws of the association in question, or at least to the standing rules or special rules of order. The assistance of a professional parliamentarian might be helpful, especially where members do not have the necessary knowledge of the rules, nor the time needed to acquire it.

The ultimate consensus was that the rules could be applied relatively faithfully, after accounting for certain fundamental differences in the logical definition of words and concepts like “meeting” and “present in person”. That said, a number of important exceptions were also noted, and a number of other interesting points raised and addressed.

These articles were reprinted together in a joint publication called Electronic Meetings, to which I have also made a link on my parliamentary resources page. I don’t agree 100% with the conclusions reached by the authors, but I’ve always found this set of articles to be an interesting read. Perhaps one day I will write my own response to this prior work, drawing on my interdisciplinary background as a former computer software professional and a current professional parliamentarian.