SBAY Networked Meeting Procedures

The "SBAY Networked Meeting Procedures" were developed by the South Bay Community Network (a.k.a. SBAY or sbay.org). They evolved as a set of procedures for Board of Directors meetings which meet a need for rules of order updated to support live electronic participation and the Internet. They are intended for a technical and Internet-savvy group and take advantage of the Internet to make the meetings more efficient and less tedious than traditional parliamentary procedures.

These meeting procedures were originally developed for SBAY's Board of Directors meetings. The idea is to document our online meeting procedure, pick what we like from existing procedures and discard as many as possible of the 19th Century terms which are no longer comfortable to use in the 21st Century. Like other meeting procedures, they should be general and flexible enough to apply to larger meetings. They are also intended to be applicable and useful to other Internet-savvy technical groups should they choose to adopt them.

There are many traditional alternatives. Robert's Rules of Order are prohibitive for volunteer organizations due to its 300+ page definition. There are abbreviated forms including University of British Columbia's Simplified Rules of Order which was originally used by SBAY. Though it is no longer available online at UBC's web site. Even the Simplified Rules of Order fell short of our needs when we add on our style of electronic meeting. Our electronic meeting format has been remarkably successful over the course of its first three years in use. In order to simplify the procedures and employ modern communications methods, we choose to depart to some degree from the British House of Commons model upon which all the current common parliamentary procedures are based. Not having another source to turn to for rules of order, we have documented the meeting style we have developed.