Out with the old Bye-Laws!

10 October 2014, 2 pm

We are going to rewrite the Bye-Laws!  From scratch!  This is so exciting that I have to leave the room to find more biscuits half-way through the Constitutional Committee’s meeting.

What is even more exciting is that we are going to ask ordinary CIPA members to come on board and help with the rewrite.  We think young people – perhaps 50 and under – might be especially good at this.  And it is important that they have a say in the new regime, because it is they who will have to live with it and we do not want them to blame us when, in 2025, everyone is attending meetings through the medium of web-mapped biomolecular transference and the 2015 Bye-Laws only allow for fusty old online voting.

So, if you think you might be able to help build a spanking new CIPA with spanking new Rules of Membership, now is the time to contact the Constitutional Committee.  I will also ask my friends at the Informals, but they may not have forgiven me yet for the shivery standy-uppy meeting in Chancery Lane yesterday.

The new Bye-Laws are going to be much simpler than the current ones.  Let’s face it, the current ones make it impossible to do anything much in CIPA apart from reading out the minutes of the last meeting, at which you also did nothing.  To give you a flavour, this is the kind of tone we are aiming for in the new set:

Meetings.  We will hold meetings if we need to.  We will hold them wherever and whenever we want, and they will not be posh.  In the absence of unforeseen fire alarms, we would rather they were held under cover please and included places for people to sit down.  We will only be unquorate if we run out of biscuits or if there are not enough of us to shout Mr Boff down.

Voting.  If we do anything important we will ask our members first.  Members will be allowed to cast their votes any way they choose, including on Twitter®, on papyrus and with their feet.  Straw polls will not be encouraged, however, because there is too much straw in this Institute already.

Classes of membership.  There will be lots of classes of membership so that everyone can find a niche, however eccentric, and also so as to improve our diversity figures.  New classes will include Accidental Member, Reluctant Member, Innocent Member and Asymptomatic Member.

Applications for membership.  If you want to be a member, send us your name and address and some dosh.  We will publish your name on a list and give people a chance to object but we really hope they don’t because it creates so much faff. 

Officers.  We will elect ourselves a President and a Vice-President to be erudite and authoritative on our behalf.  Every now and then, if we feel like it, we will elect ourselves a comedy Vice-President who is neither erudite nor authoritative but is high on entertainment value.  Our Head of Media & PR will sort out any resultant publicity problems.