Cohousing-L Mailing List: quorum definition

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

Our Bylaws say that we can have a meeting and discuss things with any 
number of people, but to make binding decisions we need a Quorum. We 
defined a quorum as 51% of our households represented. So with 20 
households, we have needed 11 represented at a meeting in order to make 
decisions. 

So far, that has worked, and we have almost never been without a quorum 
for our monthly business meeting. 

Now, there may be problems. We have sold two lots to Habitat, and they 
are thus "member households" but have no actual families yet. Two other 
households are in the process of selling, and have no stake in meetings, 
so don't attend. Another just doesn't do meetings. Two more could be out 
of the country for a while. Yikes. We could be entering a phase where 
enough families are inactive that it could be difficult or impossible to 
make a quorum by our given standards. 

One possibility is to change the standard. An idea being floated is that 
if any household has missed, say, three consecutive meetings, that would 
reduce the number needed for a quorum by one. This would never prevent 
any family from participating in decison making when they DO come. But it 
creates an active;inactive categorization, and quorum  based on a 
proportion of ACTIVE families, at that particular moment.  

(Regarding proxies, we have it set up so that in the nearly-never 
situation that we are taking a VOTE, rather than consensus, proxies' 
votes count. But consensus cannot be blocked by proxy, and quorum cannot 
be filled by proxy, since proxies aren't part of the give and take which 
is part of our consensus-seeking process. ) 

Any creative suggestions out there?

Lynn Nadeau
RoseWind Cohousing (Slow but Steady....)