Committee Chairs
Constitution and Bylaws Committee
The Constitution and Bylaws Committee reviewed several proposals for Bylaw changes or clarifications. The committee has proposed four Bylaws changes to be approved in April 2011 at the ACE in Houston, TX. After reading and/or discussing them, we encourage you to contact any of the Constitution and Bylaws Committee members, David Entzminger; Vice Chair; Clint Moore; Don Clarke; Edie Allison; John Hogg and Steven Goolsby, or myself if you have questions, need clarification, or have concerns with these proposals.
- Student Bridge: To encourage more students to become active members, we propose giving them a two-year grace period after graduation, remaining as student members while allowing time to achieve the requisite experience and enabling them to move directly into “Active” membership. The AAPG-HQ provided figures showing in the last five years only 1% of graduating student members have moved to become Actives. We hope this amendment will improve the rather disappointing “Student” to “Active” conversion.
- Certified Member: We would like to add “Certified” to the membership categories to raise the status of certification and promote it as a “Gold” standard for all members. We hope to highlight “Certified” as an achievement of reaching an elevated level of peer recognition. The DPA is very encouraged to see us make this move.
- Gender Neutrality: We see this change as a cleanup item. Our Bylaws will read “chair” instead of “chairman” and “committee members” instead of “committeemen”. This will align the C&BL’s with the gender neutral language used on the AAPG and HoD letterheads, websites and other business.
- AAPG Awards: We would like to clarify some anomalies and remove some over-restrictive language. Under this change it would now be possible for an AC/EC member to be given a HoD award for previous contributions to the HoD unrelated to their current AC/EC position. However, the language on AC/EC members not receiving AAPG awards immediately after they step down has been clarified (and strengthened). Further restrictions on awards from the Technical Divisions and HoD are to be addressed by their appropriate corresponding bylaws or Rules & Procedures documents.
The full details of each of these proposed changes will be sent to all delegates prior to the 2011 ACE meeting and will be more fully explained and presented in a future Explorer article, please stay tuned.
The following two items were passed along to the Rules and Procedure Committee where they will be more appropriately addressed:
- R&P- Gender Neutrality: Clean up the wording to read “chair” instead of “chair” and change any other appropriate language in the Rules and Procedures to correspond to the proposed for the Bylaws change.
- R&P- “ex-HoD chairs” could be placed on HoD committees as non-voting members taking advantage of their expertise and experience.
- HoD Awards: Making the HoD Executive award procedures correspond to the proposed Bylaws change for the AAPG executives.
Several other items were reviewed including:
- A suggestion that the AAPG website be amended to clarify the terms and conditions of the “Corporate Group Membership” that was approved by the HoD leadership in 2009 but has been misinterpreted. Executive Director Rick Fritz has already handled this.
- A suggestion that the Membership Committee clarify degree requirements in a “membership guidelines booklet” or similar document.
- A suggestion to the Membership Committee that they, and AAPG-HQ, review whether further improvements can be made on the AAPG website to streamline the on-line membership application, sponsorship and screening process (but keeping still within the current C&BL’s). A recommendation to drop the sponsorship requirement was considered but is not being recommended by this committee. We are passing it on to the membership committee for further consideration.
- A suggestion by Mary Bahde, our HoD parliamentarian, for a major rewrite of the Bylaws to strip out procedural details and move these into a companion “Rules and Procedures” document was considered. This would be a monumental task involving several committees and consensus building that likely will take several years to complete. As we agree, a rewrite may be helpful, we have tabled the work as we assess the benefits.