Because this detail has come up a couple of times

[james_davis_nicoll]

QWP: Readercon's administrative structure:

The board of directors is elected from the concom; they serve different functions. The board's job is to handle business matters such as the disbursement of funds. (For example, the year that half our proceeds went to the Paul Williams Fund, that was a board decision.) The concom's job is to make the convention happen.

There are annual board elections. I believe we'll need a special election to replace the board members who resigned, and they'll only serve pro tem, until the next annual meeting in January. The concom is a much more static body; once you join it with the rest of the committee's approval, you're part of it until you decide to leave (or, in an extremely rare circumstance, voted off by the rest of the committee). For each convention the conchair and program chair are selected by the concom, and then concom members volunteer for the various duties necessary to make the con happen.

Comments

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

And in his next posting, James will explain the American legislative process.

[avram]

First, an anthropomorphized piece of paper sits on a Capitol Hill staircase, singing a blues song....

[jamiam.livejournal.com]

Wonderfully sarcastic comments aside, this is pretty useful. Thanks.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

This really is significant in ways that most people don't understand. In the Readercon structure, the ultimate source of authority is the "membership," which elects a Board of Directors that is thus subservient to the Membership. Not all groups are arranged this way. For example, for legal purposes, the "membership" of San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Inc., on whose Board I sit, is the members of the Board of Directors. Therefore, there is no body senior to the Board, since the Board = Membership. The various conventions that SFSFC has run (1993 and 2002 Worldcons, 2011 and 2013 Westercons, etc.) are subservient to the Board of Directors. The chairs of those committees are selected by the SFSFC Board and can be removed by the Board. Members of the various conventions do not have a say in the election of the corporation's board of directors.

SFSFC's governing structure isn't significantly different from how many other fannish non-profit corporations operation. It does make a big difference when dealing with these sorts of controversies, and when it was explained to me that the Readercon Membership was superior to its Board of Directors, the conflict became clearer to me.