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Rules Committee Presents Draft Amendments for Review
May 17, 2018

To the Members of the IODWCA,

After the defeat of the Constitution and By-Law modifications at the 2017 AGM, a new group was formed to take another stab at some of the needed changes. There are a number of items within those documents that are problematic given the way the world works today. It is not surprising that we have reached this point – the Racing Rules of Sailing are amended every four years for example – so a periodic review of the governing documents is part of the normal course of operating a class.

In October of 2017, the Executive Committee voted to confirm the appointment of the Rules Study Committee, made up of several members of the Executive and a few other willing volunteers, and we have spent the last eight months going carefully through the two documents. We used the language proposed in 2017 as a starting point and identified many areas that were in fact acceptable as well as few that were controversial and led to the dissenting votes at the AGM. Through much discussion, blood sweat and tears, we have come forward with the documents presented currently on the web site.

If you take the time to actually read all of the changes as well as all of the endnotes and comments, I hope you will gain an appreciation of the amount of thought and effort that this group has put in. In an odd way, we are fortunate to have had some recent debate about class and fleet management that provided some real world examples of things that can happen when the documentation does not line up with the actual wishes of the members. While not perfect (as it likely will never be), we do believe that the documents as presented represent a major step forward and encompass many needed changes.

Despite the best efforts of the group, there are a few areas where we were unable to come to complete consensus. You will note some areas where the debate continues – By-Law 5 being the most prominent and most controversial but there are others. But given the time table we need to meet in order to get something in front of the AGM this August, we voted to go ahead and present the documents in draft form to the WCA. It is not required that we provide this “open discussion” period, but in the interest of openness and clarity. we wanted to give the membership-at-large a flavor of what to expect so that any potential issues can be addressed before the deadline for submission on June 28 (60 days prior to the AGM), giving us the highest possible likelihood of passage.

The Rules Study Committee will be meeting once more in early June and the WCA Executive will meet on June 20 to vote on what will be proposed at the AGM, so please keep those dates in mind if you would like to contribute to the discussion. We do encourage any member with strong feelings to weigh in. There is an email form for comments as well as a forum on the WCA web site for discussion.

It is our hope that the conversations about the controversial items will continue and the differences will narrow to the point where we can feel really good about what ends up on the table in Sweden.

On behalf of the group, we apologize for it not being more “final” but hope that opening up the conversation to the full WCA membership may help get us there.

Steve Madeira
IODWCA Executive Vice-President

Draft Documents

To see the text of the proposed documents, click “view”; to see the documents with all of their proposed edits, click “w/ markups”; or to download a Word version with tracked changes for closer study, click “download” below.

Constitution

view

w/ markups

download

Bylaws

view

w/ markups

download

Feedback

For the next three weeks, until the Rules Study Committee meets again on May 6, the Executive and the Rules Study Committees would like your comments on the proposed revisions to the IODWCA Constitution and Bylaws. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and hope to incorporate good ideas, correct spelling mistakes and typos and make last minute edits before publishing the final versions on June 27 for your consideration, in anticipation of the 2018 AGM in Sweden on August 26, 2018.

Please use the form below to submit your suggestion. Your comments will be sent directly to all members of the Executive Committee and Rules Study Committee for their consideration.

Thank you for your continued interest and dedication to the IOD Class.

Please send us your comments

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