AGU Governance and Organization Systems: Membership Input Sought
The AGU Statutes and Bylaws Committee was asked to examine the present system of AGU governance and organization, and to make recommendations for changes, if any seem warranted. Given the importance of this issue, the Statutes and Bylaws Committee is soliciting comments from the AGU membership on their conclusions about the consistency of the present AGU structure with the principles mentioned in their recent article.
October 7th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
The AGU organization has lasted for almost 90 years and has done very well. I believe that the council should be looked on a an upper house or senate with equal representation for all sections so as to avoid dominance by one or more sections. With the age of electronic communication it should be possible to put major issues to the membership as a whole for a vote by an electronic polling process that could be easily implemented and the results computed. This latter polling could be considered as a lower house.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:31 am
I have just finished a four-year term on the AGU Council as the President-Elect and President of the Atmospheric Sciences Section. At no time during my term did I find the organization of the AGU Council logical. It merely preserves a moment in history, 90 years ago, when hard-rock geology was dominant. The Council has 5 hard-rock Sections (out of 11) and 3 hard-rock Focus Groups (out of 9). This structure entirely ignores the revolution in understanding which generally goes under the term “Earth System Science”, in which the Solid Earth sphere is not dominant but merely one among equals, the other spheres being the familiar Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, Cryosphere, and Biosphere. The hard-rock Sections naturally wish to preserve their dominance, but I do not think this is healthy for AGU.
Another issue is that there are 9 Focus Groups waiting in the wings to join the Council as full voting members, following in the footsteps of Biogeosciences. This would only increase the illogicality of the Council structure, since Focus Groups are created based on individual initiative at the grassroots level, not on any view of the logical makeup of the Council imposed from above. The Council already teeters on the edge of being too large to be an effective discussion body, and the addition of any more Focus Groups as voting members would push it over the edge.
What is needed is not to preserve a 90-year-old historical snapshot, but to trim down the Council to a manageable size (12-14 voting members in my opinion) which fairly represents the current state of Earth System Science. This would then allow vigorous discussion of important issues, something that was sorely lacking on the Council during my tenure (although there were some shining exceptions which I shall always treasure).
Note that the US Senate or the House of Lords is certainly not a logical model to follow for the AGU Council. These were bodies created as a kind of compromise–the US Senate to get the small states to sign the original Constitution, and the House of Lords to get the landed aristocracy to buy into the newly emerging democracy in England.