The Delegates' Voice
March 2011

Committee Reports

Constitution and Bylaws Committee

Lloyd

Peter Lloyd

Chair

The Constitution and Bylaws (C&BL) committee reviewed several proposals for Bylaw changes or clarifications. The committee proposed four Bylaws changes to be approved in April 2011 at the ACE meeting in Houston, TX.

  1. 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 us figures showing in the last 5 years only 1% of graduating student members have moved to become Active. We hope this amendment will improve the rather disappointing “Student” to “Active” conversion.
  2. 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.
  3. 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 for other business.
  4. 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 R&P documents.

After additional review, a friendly amendment is to be proposed to the amendment:

  1. Certified Member: To show that “Certified” has ranking, a member order was introduced to put Certified just below Honorary, but ahead of Emeritus, Active, Student and Associate. There was some language to clarify the description for Certified Members.

The following items were passed along to the appropriate committees where they will be properly addressed:

  1. R&P Gender Neutrality: Clean up the wording to read “chair” instead of chairman and change any other appropriate language in the R&P to correspond to the proposed for the Bylaws change.
  2. R&P “ex-HoD chairs” could be placed on HoD committees as non-voting members taking advantage of their expertise and experience.
  3. R&P & Resolution: Review the procedure for notifying section presidents that do not have named delegates with in the 60 days prior to the annual meeting.
  4. HoD Awards: Making the HoD award procedures correspond to the proposed Bylaws change for the AAPG.

Several other items were reviewed including:

  1. 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. Director Rick Fritz has already handled this.
  2. A suggestion that the Membership Committee clarify degree requirements in a “membership guidelines booklet” or similar document. These guidelines might also provide application processing for delegates, practical definitions and examples of how terms used in the Bylaws are interpreted and applied. The goal is to facilitate application processing by delegates to improve consistency of the process across AAPG.
  3. 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 online membership application, sponsorship and screening process (but keeping still within the current C&BLs). 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.
  4. 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.
  5. A “Student Bridge” friendly amendment from Paul Hoffman (to clarify some language) is under review.