The following two amendments to the USGW Bylaws were
proposed in ILGenWeb. The voters of ILGenWeb passed the
proposal by more than 2/3 of those voting.
The proposed amendments and accompanying rationales
have been sent to The Advisory Board, via a member of
that body, for posting at the National Website.
Please disseminate these to your state lists. ILGenWeb would
welcome your co-sponsorship.
Thank you,
Ginger
gingerh(a)shawneelink.com
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Amendment I
Article IX, Sec. 3:
In the interests of diversity, independence and autonomy of The USGenWeb
Project, state and county coordinators are encouraged to utilize a variety
of servers as hosts of their webpages. An attempt shall be made by the
national Advisory Board to avoid utilizing any one server organization for
hosting more than 40% of the total number of USGenWeb Project web pages.
[ PASSED]
Rationale for the above proposed amendment:
The success and viability of the internet is in large measure a function of
the multiple pathways available to communicate between numerous different
sites. If one link goes down, others exist to take its place. So too is it
advisable to have a multitude of servers which hold The USGenWeb Project's
web pages. If most pages within The USGenWeb Project are based on only one
server site, should something happen to that site, be it a physical
disaster or a human one such as bankruptcy, The USGenWeb Project would be
severely compromised. On the other hand, if The USGenWeb Project
is based on a number of different server locales, one site going offline
would not have that drastic an effect on the whole project. The proposed
amendment strengthens the independence and autonomy of The USGenWeb
Project, helping to guarantee the project's longevity.
Amendment II
Article IX, Sec. 4:
While realizing that a variety of indexing and storage methods exist for
queries, obituaries, wills, archival documents etc., The USGenWeb Project
strongly recommends that county and state coordinators maintain control
over
these items after they are submitted to the USGenWeb Project or its
subsidiary state and county pages. Therefore, links for submitting items
to
sites outside of The USGenWeb Project are strongly discouraged, unless the
links themselves remain under the control of The USGenWeb Project
coordinators.
[ PASSED]
Rationale for the proposed amendment:
The current bylaws (Article XI, Sec. 3) requires the local website to
include an easily accessible area to researchers' queries. Article XI, Sec.
4 further states that "those sections of the website submitted or donated by
contributors other than the website coordinator, shall remain with the
website." Neither Sec. 3 nor Sec. 4 can be adhered to
unless those parts of the web page are under the control of the County and
State Coordinators, to be passed along to the next coordinator. The thrust
of this proposed amendment is also to strengthen the autonomy of The
USGenWeb Project and its constituent services such as query pages so that
the Project does not become engulfed and incorporated by any other internet
system of managing queries, wills, obituaries, surnames, etc. The queries,
obituaries, etc. belong to the submitter first and secondly to The USGenWeb
Project and no one else. Others may link to our pages - but our pages must
not become their pages.