I have now read the BCA documentation, the excellent posts on UKCaving, the CSCC view and the article on darkness below. I am still undecided which way I will vote but, as of this evening, am minded to support the changes, albeit reluctantly. However I do not need to vote for a few more weeks and I would like to be as informed as I can when I do. All (polite) help is welcome in this respect.
My current thinking is as follows:
Removal of Group Vote: I have a minor concern about this, but am convinced this is more than outweighed by the benefits of fairness and simplification this proposal brings, so support it.
For the record, my minor concern is that, despite what has been said on UKCaving about the clubs that choose to not take insurance joining BCA as non-voting Associate Members, unless things have changed radically since I was involved in BCA, this is not usually the case. Associate (non-voting) membership tended to be taken by Show Caves and commercial organisations who wished to be associated with BCA and its aims but are not set up as Clubs. On the other hand, there were always a number of clubs who chose to pay the basic club fee to become Members, but who did not require their members to join individually and, therefore, not get the benefits of insurance. These were often university clubs who, I assumed, had insurance through their Student Unions. Clubs who choose to join BCA in this way will now lose any voting rights despite paying BCA a fee and being a member. That seems wrong. On balance, though, I accept that the greater good comes from accepting the proposal. I do not see my view as likely to change on this, but am open to sensible argument.
Introduction of online voting: This is where I struggle more and I have two broad concerns. Firstly I have sat in enough meetings in my time to know that reasoned argument and the greater experience of others can change minds and that this is a good thing for the organisation. Whether an AGM attendee has a detailed understanding of BCA or not (and it is actually quite a complex organisation), by the end of the discussion on a matter, they will have heard the counter arguments and been made aware of any potential complications. Whichever way they vote, they are then voting knowledgably. To expect all 6,000 members presented with a quick yes-no question on their phone, to read all the supporting documentation relating to an issue before they vote, is simply unrealistic, particularly if this is spread all over the internet because BCA Executive (understandably) don?t want to open themselves to accusations of unfairness by trying to summarise it all in one document. All the more so if votes happen on multiple issues and every year. I suspect the vast majority of voting will be uninformed. To an extent this has been proven to me by 9 different members having so far contacted me to ask which way they should vote in this ballot; they have no interest in doing the research but are happy to spend a few seconds clicking ?yes? or ?no? if told to do so by someone else.
Secondly, and more worryingly for me, I can see the potential for huge problems further down the line. What happens if two contradictory proposals are set before the AGM? Some members like one, and some the other. Neither receives a big majority but they pass the 25% threshold and then go to an online vote. We could end up with two contradictory proposals being voted in. Imagine one seeks to scrap the role of, say, the Publications & Information (P&I) Committee and its work be taken on by a new Media Officer, and the other proposes that the P&I Committee get an extra ?5k to develop its social-media presence. Then what if both are approved by the membership?
How will we proceed if there are, for example, two candidates for a particular role and there is a tie? An AGM would come up with a solution somehow, but a ballot cannot. Council can hardly, then, override the decision of a full ballot of the members, and BCA could be left without a Chair, Treasurer, or other key role.
How does anybody go about voting for 2 candidates out of 3 to be Individual-Member Reps through online voting? Where has this been planned out?
What if someone is proposed for multiple roles because, for example, they really want to be Treasurer, but if they are not elected, they would like to take up their former role as Equipment & Techniques Officer? In a normal AGM, they could take the decision on the day to stand down as a candidate for the lesser role(s) if they were already elected. With online voting this cannot happen. What if that person ? who is really good and popular ? is then elected to multiple roles by the online ballot? If we manually pull them out of the running after the ballot, who is to say how the members who voted for them would have voted if they had not been an option?
All these questions need thinking about and could make the new system as proposed unworkable. I have spent the last few days reflecting on this and almost came down on the side of the status-quo because that - at least sort of ? works. However, after considerable thought, I am minded to vote in favour because I see most of the issues above as either unlikely, solvable through the Manual of Operations, or ideally avoided in the first place by very careful Chairmanship of the AGM.
Finally, unrelated to all this, my memory is that the AGM scrapped the P&I Committee and replaced it with a new member of the Executive instead. I am surprised this has not been addressed by updating 6.1 of the Constitution.