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RAC Summary
Resource Allocation Committee
General Information
- Recommended Composition of the Committee
- Size of Committee; nominations; and 'good standing'
- Committee Responsibilities
- Standard method(s) of communication
- Committee Decision Making
- Linkage Policy (Administered by the DCN Web Team)
R.A. Committee Composition:
The Resource Allocation Committee will function best if its membership includes a mix of people whose combined knowledge, experience, skills and interests represent the following:
- Local and regional affairs
- Community electronic networking (including practical, philosophical and ethical issues);
- Cutting edge development in Internet technologies;
- Specific aspects of the social / cultural / educational / political / environmental / business and economic fabric of Davis and the region - and a willingness to help represent such interests on the committee;
- Public dialog on electoral or public policy issues;
- Libel and intellectual property issues in relation to the Internet;
R.A. Committee Membership:
The following statement was affirmed by consensus September 3, 1997.
- The RAC should have a minimum of 5 and no more than 15 members.
- Prospective members may be self-nominated or may be proposed by any DCN Board or committee member or by DCN staff. Such nominees for RAC membership will be approved by the RAC at a regular committee meeting.
- The Board is asked to ratify Committee membership from time to time as new members join the committee.
- To retain membership-in-good-standing committee members must avoid having two consecutive absences.
- To regain membership-in-good-standing a committee member must attend two consecutive meetings and will regain standing at the second of these.
- One or more members of the Web Team should be members of the RAC. Web Team members are encouraged to attend RAC meetings.
- Visitors are welcome to attend regular monthly meetings.
- Prospective members are encouraged to attend an RAC meeting before joining.
Responsibilities of the R.A. Committee:
The Resource Allocations Committee is responsible for:
Building DCN information through sponsored-projects and allocation of DCN resources.
The Role of the Committee is to:
- Ensure that DCN projects and applications are selected to be sponsored in such a way that the community's needs are broadly represented, taking into consideration DCN goals, current grants and other projects.
Sponsorship implies that the project is under the overall DCN umbrella, that the DCN is willing to be an umbrella organzation for grant and other funding applications for that project, and help to look for resources like volunteers and vendor matches; that the DCN network infrastructure would be available (accounts, training, user support, etc.), and that the DCN would help evaluate the project.
- The Committee reviews the DCN web content on an ongoing basis and, with the Web Team, endeavors to maintain a fresh (current?) useful, model, community web site
Standard method(s) of communication:
Electronic first
- for open information/open meeting/public documents use DCN committee web page;
- for semi-private discussions (including meeting agendas), use moderated list-processor called dcn-projects-committee@list.dcn.davis.ca.us. (Co-chairs are to be administrators of the listserver);
- Use private e-mail aliases and phone for private discussions;
- Use documents attached to e-mail (Eudora) for graphics documents and portions of sponsored project applications which are graphical in nature
Listserve / Listprocessor: dcn-projects committee@list.dcn.davis.ca.us
- This mailing list is used by the committee for committee discussion between meetings. Subscribers to the list can include DCN Board members, members of the Resource Allocations Committee (RAC), and legitimate members of other DCN committees. DCN subscribers or others whose involvement with the list discussions brings a benefit to DCN and the RAC may request inclusion on the list. In general the justification for inclusion on the list must involve some benefit to DCN and specifically to the RAC. Such non-automatic requests are considered on an individual basis by the RAC at a regular committee meeting
- August 6, 1997 - The committee approved a "do not forward" policy for postings to the committee mailing list, a note to that effect to be automatically generated at the foot of all messages:
--------------Automatic footer generated by Majordomo ------------
The above message was posted to the DCN Resource Allocations Committee Restricted List. Per RAC e-mail policies, you have agreed to not circulate messages beyond the list as a condition of being a member of this internal list.
Decision-making process:
The following statement was affirmed by consensus November 5, 1997.
- A simple majority of members-in-good-standing shall be the quorum to allow the conduct of committee business.
- The committee will strive for consensus with fallback - under unusual circumstances - of a 66 2/3% majority vote of the committee-members-in-good-standing who are voting on the issue.
- In exceptional circumstances as for example when an urgency exists and a quorum was not available at a regular meeting, electronic e-mail votes may be accepted. The motion must be clearly expressed, with statements pro and con if any, and distributed by e-mail to every member of the committee. The message must state that lack of a response from an RAC member in good standing denotes approval. Votes must be returned prior to a stated deadline to be counted. It is understood that when an issue is non-controversial the RAC chair may take expeditious, unilateral action
- The count of votes for and against any motion is included in the minutes.
- Proposal decisions are made on the basis of consistently-applied, documented and pre-defined criteria (evaluated annually), based on a resource budget set annually by the Board (with input from various committees). Budget includes funding resources as well as items such as disk space, overhead associated with training, documentation and support by individual user (i.e., total # of users DCN can afford to add during the year).
Linkage Policy (Administered by the DCN Web Team)
Links from DCN pages fall into two main categories. The first category consists of links which are placed in the context of DCN's information pages, and so are part of our public-service "face", and includes links to miniproject or sponsored project pages ("project" links), as well as links to pages on other web servers ("external" links). The second category consists of subscriber home pages accessible through the subscriber list or a direct URL. The two kinds of links are treated differently, as described in the Linkage Guidelines that were approved by the RAC (was IPC) on 6/4/97 and are administered by the DCN Web Team.
See also:
Anne Hance rahance@dcn.org