GOVERNANCE

The charge of the Governance subcommittee was to:

  1. Draw up recommendations for a league governing body, including by-laws, from each of the other six standing subcommittees;
  2. To propose a name for the organization;
  3. To suggest procedures for the selection of league officers along with the terms and descriptions of each office...etc.;
  4. To research the means by which a self-sustaining nonprofit organization could be best initiated and maintained.

The Governance subcommittee did not exist for long in OCCRA as their reason for being quickly became obsolete.  The ISD decided that it would be able to serve as the organizing body and the fiduciary agent for the foreseeable future.  The subcommittee had briefly considered having OCCRA join in with the same organization that administers most of the athletic activities in the county, but problems immediately surfaced.  The Oakland Activities Association (OAA) would have been a good fit except several of the schools planning OCCRA were not OAA members and were not likely to be in the near future.  Membership in the OAA carried a price tag along with certain league requirements that would not work for all prospective OCCRA members.  Still, for other groups attempting to form robotics leagues, this might be a good route to take: all the mechanisms for financing, officiating, rules decisions, and policy-making etc. would already be in place.  Anything that a founding association can do to simplify things is a good idea: forming a new league is hard enough without having to reinvent the wheel.

           

The committee-as-a-whole decided to accept the ISD’s offer to serve as the umbrella agency for the association.  The committee also decided to keep the organizational name that had been suggested in the original proposal.  The superintendent of the ISD named the director of the ISD’s four Technical Centers to oversee the development and administration of the new association (no officers have ever been elected for OCCRA.)  This director then selected the building administrator of one of the four Technical Centers (where several committee members worked) to be “the point person” for OCCRA.  The seven subcommittees were left to function semi-autonomously within the constraints of the ISD’s standard operating procedures.  For example, all ISD accounting and purchasing procedures were to be followed; all press releases were to be sent through the ISD’s communications office, the ISD’s logo and anti-discrimination policy had to be on all printed material …etc.