- Ensure that the agenda of all regularly scheduled meetings are posted at least one month in advance of the meeting. Any non-emergency teleconferences should have the agenda posted at least one week in advance of the meeting. Any emergency teleconference should have the agenda posted as promptly as practicable. Mini-minutes for all such meetings should be posted/distributed within one week of the meeting. Full minutes should be posted as soon as they are approved by the AMC. (If minutes aren't electronically approved and must wait until the subsequent in-person meeting, those minutes should not only be in the appendix of that in-person meeting, but should be cross-posted to the original meeting's date.)
- Provide additional and more in-depth notes for line items (especially "larger ticket" items) in the budget, making sure that various subcategories for each line have distinctly numbered notes, for ease in finding them.
- Make sure that with any pending litigation, especially when such coincides with creation of the budget, that a good-faith estimate of expenses is included in the budget under the normally occurring, logical line item - do not create a new and redundant line item that has no explanation of its meaning, such as was done on the financial reports with the Inpharmatica lawsuit (and which was never included in a budget).
- I would like serious consideration be made to video/audio recording the AMC meetings and making that available to the membership. While doing so in real-time might not be feasible with our current resources, making such a recording available for download after the fact should not be too taxing on the servers.
- While I'm not sure about the oft-made suggestion about opening up the AMC list to all AML members on a read-only basis (as I think it could be way too easy for a larger number of people than serve on AMC to clog up AMC members' inboxes with their own suggestions for the ongoing, preliminary conversations that might occur on the AMC list), I think it might be a good idea to have the default for that list be non-confidential, where someone posting needs to actively insert a confidentiality label on something that reasonably should be confidential. (How much other than litigation, contractual negotiations, and "personnel" discussions have any reason to be labeled as confidential?) If an AMC member is forwarding along information from that list for some reason, they should do so in its entirety (so context is preserved). Ideally, AMC members should treat that list, predominantly, as if it's an open meeting, and should be willing to write what they'd be willing to say in front of an open mic before the membership.
- The schedule of in-person committee meetings should be available to the membership as soon as is practicable, as all committee meetings are, in theory, open to the membership to observe. Ideally, this would be approximately the same timing as the agenda being sent out, essentially one month ahead of the meeting, since they're typically only in conjunction with regularly scheduled AMC meetings with the possible exception of the Budget meeting. The date/time and location of the Finance Committee's meeting re: the budget for the subsequent fiscal year should be readily available to the membership, so that they might have some input into the process in advance of the AMC meeting which votes on adopting that budget. The date, time, and locations of all of the in-person committee meetings, including all scheduled AMC meetings, should be available in a single location. (Mar. 3 edit: The proposed budget is already released to the membership in advance of the meeting where the AMC would vote on it.)
- RVCs should make sure to write a column for their regions' newsletters which mentions various items of interest being handled by AMC, in addition to plugging various events that are occurring in various local groups within their respective regions. Ideally, there would be more frequent communication from the AMC members - especially ExComm members - in the Bulletin than their once-a-year reports. While the Chairman has a monthly column, the rest of the ExComm having regularly scheduled columns would be a nice way of increasing the connection between AMC and the membership.
- No longer have any motions formally made by committees. While their creation may be initiated within the committees, all motions should be formally brought and seconded by actual named individuals. This allows visibility into who is actually putting forward the motion, rather than obscuring it behind a group label.
For the moment, that's what comes to mind. I will update this list if additional items spring forth.
