ACS Congress has resolved to become a Company Limited by Guarantee (CLG) by July 2021.
As part of this process, we will undertake wide consultation with our members on the constitution for the CLG.
A plan has been developed to deliver these objectives.
As part of the plan, we have had to consider how to deliver whilst living with the reality of COVID-19 restrictions which, unfortunately, are likely to remain with us for some time.
The plan is to establish two parallel activities.
The first is to put the case to members for a small change in the existing rules to allow future rule changes to be voted on using an online system.
The aim is to allow all eligible voting members (currently around 10,000) to cast their vote online over a period of weeks, in a similar way to the way branch elections are currently conducted.
The advantages include the removal of the need to attend physical meetings, and the need to complete proxy forms.
This will be increasingly important during periods of COVID-19 restrictions.
The second, parallel, activity is to undertake wide consultation with members on the future constitution.
Given the size of the membership, an online system will be used to collect feedback and provide it to Congress for consideration.
The goal is to arrive at an agreed constitution which can be put to members, hopefully using online voting.
To complement these activities, we will engage an election management service to independently manage the online voting as well as using a system to help collect feedback.
We will also engage a specialist internal communication service to ensure that members are fully informed during the entire process of change.
The goal is to achieve all of this within one year.
A summary of the project timeline is shown below:
ACS looks forward to receiving feedback from its members.
