The Unlock Democracy council elections: an apology and a proposal

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a somewhat critical post here about my experience of the recent Unlock Democracy council elections.

The Director of that organisation, Peter Facey, wrote a comment in response to that post. Unfortunately, for some reason, that comment got caught in the blog’s spam trap and I only noticed it was there at the end of last week.

So I would like to apologise to Peter for missing his response.

In it he says;

“Now that the ballot is closed it would be good to have a debate about how and if people would like to change our rules so that they can be debated at our AGM in November.”

Given that my previous post on this subject was a bit of a whinge – my main motivation was I think to highlight the negative impact that the election process had had on my impression of the organisation – I thought I ought to try and make a more positive contribution to that debate.

I am not sure that I am the right person to start drafting constitutional amendments for an organisation I am only marginally involved with, but it did make me think about the shape that the arrangements for internal elections should take in membership organisations more generally. I’ve written up the product of that thinking in the following post on this blog;

‘10 principles for the management of internal elections in membership organisations’.

I hope it is of some use in shaping the thinking of Unlock Democracy and others.

This content was originally posted on my old Strange Thoughts blog.