How to fill a vacancy on the steering committee

This is the procedure for filling a vacancy on HATCH collective’s steering committee. The steering committee is considered to have vacancies if:

• It has fewer than five people on it, or
• One or more of the representation requirements below have not been met.

The steering committee must fulfil the following requirements:

• At least one member must be Black.
• At least half of the committee must be BAME.
• At least two members must be disabled.
• At least one member must have self-medicated oestrogen.
• At least one member must have self-medicated testosterone.
• At least two thirds of the committee must have self-medicated hormones of some kind.
• At least one member must be currently self-medicating hormones.
• At least one member must be from a formerly or currently colonised country.
• At least one member must be under 30.
• At least one member must be over 50.

All members of the steering committee must be trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, or otherwise have self-medicated hormones for purposes of gender.

To select new members for the steering committee:

1. Select someone to oversee the application process. If there are any members on the steering committee, this must be one of them. Otherwise, it will be a director of HATCH collective Ltd.

2. Create a form for applications to the steering committee. It should collect the following information:

   • The name of the applicant.
   • The e-mail address of the applicant.
   • Whether the applicant is trans, non-binary or otherwise gender non-conforming. (This can be a simple yes/no.)
   • Whether the applicant belongs to any of the above list of demographics. This should be a set of checkboxes that allow the applicant to select all that apply to them.
   • Whether the applicant agrees to the principles of HATCH collective, as laid out on the website.
   • Any other information they would like HATCH collective to be aware of.

   At the top of the form, include a short paragraph explaining the role of the steering committee. Include a link to this procedure.

   Make sure that responses to this form go to the person you selected in step 1, or to a shared spreadsheet that you both can access.

3. Advertise via social media that HATCH collective is looking for members for its steering committee. State that priority will be given to members of disadvantaged groups, and link to the form. State that the work of the steering committee is paid at the living wage as set by the Living Wage Foundation.

4. Wait for at least two weeks from the initial advertisement, or ideally a month. Repeat the advertisement several times over this period. Continue waiting until you have at least one applicant from every demographic with a representation requirement that is currently unrepresented on the committee.

5. Make a list of all representation requirements that the committee is not currently meeting.

6. Together with the person selected in step 1, go through the list of applicants.

   • Eliminate any duplicate or incomplete responses, and any responses that you both agree are likely to be bogus.
   • Eliminate any responses where the applicant is not trans, non-binary or otherwise gender non-conforming.
   • Eliminate any responses where the applicant did not agree to the principles of HATCH collective.
   • Eliminate any responses where the applicant has already been on the committee at any point in the last 12 months.

   If, after doing this, you do not have candidates to meet one of the outstanding representation requirements, go back to step 4.

7. For each applicant, assign a score:

   • For each demographic the applicant belongs to that is currently not sufficiently represented on the committee, allot 10 points.
   • For each demographic the applicant belongs to that has a representation requirement that the committee currently meets, allot 1 point.

8. Select, at random, one of the applicants with the highest point total.

9. If there are more vacancies to fill, perform steps 6 and 7 again, recalculating the point totals each time. Repeat until all vacancies have been filled.

The people selected will be on the committee for one year, or until their membership lapses due to inactivity. Membership will lapse due to inactivity if a committee member has been out of contact for at least two calendar months and they have failed to respond to three or more messages over that period.

Rationale

This system has been designed to ensure that reprsentation requirements are fulfilled whenever possible. At each stage, the system will select someone to fill as many outstanding representation requirements as possible, with ties broken by the number of other demographics the applicant represents. By selecting the committee in this way, we maximise the number of people on the committee who experience multiple intersecting axes of oppression, and ensure a diversity of experience.

HATCH collective is not a democracy. The purpose of HATCH collective is simple and clearly-defined, and the only decisions to be made in HATCH are how best to serve that purpose. The role of the steering committee is to help us do this by guiding the design of our procedures to avoid excluding anyone who may need our help. The steering committee does not have to be democratically-selected to do this, and a democratic process could hamper the diversity we aim to cultivate by selecting for a particularly “acceptable” or “charismatic” sort of person.

There are no reserved spaces for LGB people, because we anticipate most applicants will be LGB. If this turns out not to be the case, we will adjust the procedure accordingly.

There are no reserved spaces for people who belong to the majority group on any particular axis, because people in the majority do not need help having their voices heard.