[Board] Open meeting information

[Tiffany Little]

Good morning,

One of my action items from our previous meeting was to investigate
information about open meeting/sunshine laws, in regards to whether or not
we should consider holding our meetings over videoconference instead of IRC.

I've compiled what I've looked at in the Google doc below, but what I've
gleaned thus far:

- Open meeting laws tend to apply directly to governmental agencies, or
those who receive funding from government agencies. This doesn't seem to
apply to us, but for the sake of research:

- Open meeting laws seem to just specify that:

   - The meetings should be announced to the public before the meeting
   takes place.
   - Meetings should be open to the public, but the public is not
   necessarily required/allowed to participate.
   - Meeting minutes should be publicly available shortly after the meeting.
   - Meetings are not required to be recorded, as the minutes are the
   official "recording" of the meeting.

None of these things seem to be an impediment to the format that we conduct
meetings in. We may want to consider recording meetings for the benefit of
the Secretary to create minutes, but once the minutes are approved by the
Board it wouldn't be necessary to post a recording of the meeting.

If there are serious concerns with transparency or remaining in line with
any regulations, we can always ask for Dilly's take on it, but my personal
opinion is that none of the above items are onerous or really out of line
from what we do now. It just requires the Secretary position to fully
function as Secretary instead of just relying on IRC bots. That would be my
opinion even if I wasn't the Secretary. :)

Here's the Google doc with the sources that I looked at.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-jJcp7WeLsDkSt8liRP6Bgud1061Fqe_8tBWr1pdMTE/edit

Thanks,
Tiffany

Tiffany Little, PINES Services Specialist: Acquisitions

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