This post originally appeared on the ACH blog.

Our DH scholarly organization, the ACH, recently approved and implemented amendments to its constitution and bylaws, a process that required votes by the officers, the Executive Council, and the ACH membership. I know that sounds dry, but governing docs matter in how we do our work and how we hold ourselves accountable to our commitments and values! As ACH Secretary, I put in significant time drafting proposed rewrites, discussing and taking feedback, and running a formal vote process for these, with help from other ACH officers.

This post provides an overview of the main areas of the text we updated, and why. This is both DH infrastructure work and DH community design work. It may also be of interest to folks curious about joining the ACH as a member (very low cost, compared to other orgs: $26/year for students and seniors, $40 for others; discount on our annual conference registration cost, which is also unusually inexpensive) or running for ACH’s council. (If you’re curious about DH, and willing to put in volunteer work and be an ACH member, you’re eligible to run for council! We need all kinds of folks, including students, staff, and alt-ac folks as well as faculty; and you do not need advanced DH expertise or seniority to be eligible. Watch the ACH blog late fall/early spring each year for the call for nominations, and chat with me if you have any questions.)

Key changes

Quoted text uses bold italics to indicate new/edited text:

Social justice is core to ACH’s work. “ACH recognizes that this work is inherently and inextricably sociopolitical, and thus advocates for social change through the use of computers and related technologies in the study of humanistic subjects.”

This is language already used in our website and other text materials, but we wanted to enshrine it in our constitution. We’ll be discussing the possibility of revising this part later, given “social change” does not necessarily mean the positive “social justice” I believe we intended (as multiple members have pointed out). Some of the other constitution text was outdated or unclear enough to need edits ASAP, so we stuck with that existing language for now, as the formal voting procedure required the whole process of officer, then Exec, then membership voting to restart if any text was changed and we’ll want more input on this piece before we vote on it.

Membership depends on conduct; community protection. “Membership shall be open, through the processes established by ACH and published on its website, to all persons interested in furthering the purpose of ACH, as long as they abide by ACH’s codes of conduct. ACH Officers further reserve the right to remove membership and its benefits temporarily or permanently from, and/or bar from attending ACH-(co)sponsored events, any member in violation of the letter or spirit of our codes of conduct. Disputes over presence or severity of codes of conduct violations will be ultimately decided by majority vote of the current ACH Officers, relying on the spirit rather than the letter of any codes. Final vote outcome (yea or nay; not individual votes) should be recorded privately for the understanding of future officers and prevention of removed members from rejoining.”

Adds a clear process for protecting our community, preventing quibbles trying to privilege letter over spirit of community conduct. Refers abstractly to codes of conduct, allowing us to consider adding a general code where previously we’ve only had conference-specific ones.

Term limits “To spread professional opportunities and maintain a diverse Exec with fresh points of view, ACH council reps shall not be eligible for re-election to a council rep role that begins the year starting immediately after their council rep term ends; they must spend the length of one year not being a council rep before they may serve in that role again. No person shall be allowed to serve more than 2 total terms as a council rep (i.e. one 4-year term followed by at least the required 1-year break, followed by a second 4-year term at some point; after which they may not serve as a council rep again). The exception is people who fill the rest of the term for a vacated council rep role; that partial term shall not be counted toward the 2 total full terms of allowed council rep service.”

Limits both consecutive and total council rep terms, with the goal of spreading professional opportunities around more equitably.

“Lazy consensus” voting
“The Exec may approve an amendment proposal by receiving positive votes equal to at least two-thirds of the total returned votes. When counting votes to determine if the two-thirds majority has been met, non-responses count as yeas; in other words, the default vote is yea and members must actively vote nay if they wish to oppose (i.e. “lazy consensus”). A member may also vote to abstain; an abstention reduces the total number of returned votes by 1 vote. Then a ballot shall be sent to the entire membership and at least 14 days allowed for return. The distribution, voting, and counting of the ballots shall be conducted via a platform private to the Exec (such as the Exec email listserv). Ratification shall require a two-thirds majority of the votes cast, following the same “lazy consensus” procedure described above.”

We’ve long used “lazy consensus” for informal internal decisions when our rules have allowed it. This approach asks stakeholders to reply by x deadline with a yea or nay; any non-replies by the deadline are treated as approvals, for purposes of voting count/establishing if a majority of approvers is reached (i.e. if you approve or don’t mind a proposal, you can just not reply). This clarifies we can use lazy consensus as part of our formal voting. This has the benefit of avoiding good proposals not moving forward because not enough people replied to a voting email. This also clarifies who abstention works, in terms of how a vote count is totaled, which was previously unclear.

Conditions for membership, Executive Council rep roles, and officer roles
“The privileges of ACH shall be withdrawn from any member:
whose membership has lapsed more than 1 month,
who has requested by email to membership@ach.org to have their membership ended,
Who is an officer or other Exec member and has not filled out the annual conflict of interest statement by two weeks after the deadline identified in an email requesting it, and/or
who is voted to be removed from membership due to codes of conduct violations (see ACH Constitution, Part III for details). For officers and other Exec members whose privileges of membership are withdrawn, their appointed or elected role’s term is simultaneously immediately ended. It is the responsibility of members, including officers and other Exec members, to remember to renew. ACH will send one automated reminder 2 weeks before a membership is due to expire…”

Sets some basic expectations for elected and appointed service on the council, as these are not empty/vanity roles but require attending a minimum number of meetings, vounteering for and completing a set of ACH tasks, and replying to council communications. Reduces officer work so it’s clear we don’t need to monitor and repeatedly ask for council reps and officers to fill out necessary forms or renew their membership, and you need to remain a paid member to serve. Makes explicit the code of conduct discussed earlier can result in removal from membership and/or Exec.

Explicit expectations for Exec members’ contributions & remaining in elected/appointed roles
“Removal or resignation of Exec members Exec members may be unable to participate as planned for a number of reasons; when this occurs, a no-fault early term end is available; as well as an option for Officers to enact a no-fault early term end for Exec members not participating to an expected level, so that the position may be filled with an active participant. a. ACH strives to accommodate life needs, and appreciates that the Exec provides unpaid volunteer labor. The intent of these rules is to encourage Exec members to proactively contact the Officers group around anticipated or surprise challenges meeting participation expectations; and to also provide no-fault options freeing a role for someone with more time to meet ACH’s needs, when the Officers determine that is in the ACH’s best interests. Incumbents may be removed from roles if not meeting basic participation requirements, i.e. a. for Officers, not attending at least every other Officer meeting over the course of 4 months, without prior writing to officers@ach.org to identify a known and unavoidable schedule conflict; and/or b. for all Exec members, not attending 3 Exec meetings in a calendar year (including AGM and Annual Planning Meeting) without prior communication to officers@ach.org to identify a known and unavoidable schedule conflict; and/or c. not signing up for, and/or not performing, a reasonable minimum of ACH tasks as identified to the Exec by the Officers (such as through a shared task spreadsheet), without prior writing to officers@ach.org to request help in identifying tasks fitting ones skills and time For reps, all Officers should agree on the removal; for Officers, all other Officers should agree. a. The person in question should receive a friendly warning by email, cc’ing officers@ach.org, with a requirement to reply within 2 weeks identifying if they wish to continue in the role and confirm they can rectify participation within the next month following reply; or that they wish to take a no-fault exit. b. If the person does not reply within 2 weeks, or replies but does not rectify participation within the next month following the 2-week reply period, their term is ended (including removal from meetings, listservs, and from the current Exec people webpage)”

This text benefits our Exec members and officers: makes clear elected/appointed council members and officers can end their terms if life circumstances require, without fault. We wanted to explicitly recognize and plan for how these are unpaid volunteer roles, that personal health and wellness are priorities, and that it may feel difficult to notice and then communicate you can no longer keep up with expectations you’d committed to.

This text also benefits the ACH’s needs: it allows the ACH to promptly refill roles with people able to do the needed work. Important in making the professional benefits of holding these roles fairly require the same contributed effort from all role-holders.

Respond to realities of past nomination processes
“II. Elections”

Removes the past stipulation that our council elections offer at least twice as many candidates as the roles available, so we only have as many people run as are actually willing to serve if elected (vs. past sometimes having to ask people to run just to fill in the double candidates requirement, even though they didn’t want to and weren’t able to actually serve if elected). This is also kinder, in not forcing at least half of all people who kindly volunteer to run to not ultimately be elected into a role that year.

Filling Exec roles if vacated “III. Vacancies”

Clarifies how we fill Exec roles that are vacated, or when someone elected ends up unable to take on the role: going through the list of people who ran in the most recent election but were not elected, starting with the person with the most votes then working downward until a willing person is found.

Remove bureaucratic cruft & update terminology “IV. Standing Committees”

What working groups are needed to run the ACH’s recurring infrastructure and special projects changes by year. Whether these are handled as formal committees, or as lighter-weight groups of volunteers who each have a set task rather than just an asbtract membership on a committee, also fluctuates. We removed requirements to have any but one necessary committee (“Nominations”, who manage publicizing our election nominations and encouraging applicants, and transmitting nominations to the secretariat to set up our formal elections, adding additional layer of fairness to who is solicited and forwarded).

“V. Special Interest Groups” Renames ACH Working Groups as SIGs, to make the formal nature of this work more legible for credit, tenure, and/or promotion.

Smaller changes

Many small changes were intended make the language more accessibly human-readable, such as establishing and use shorthand throughout (e.g. “Exec” instead of writing out “Association for Computers and the Humanities Executive Council” every time). We also removed outdated references (e.g. voting by fax), and references that bound us unnecessarily to one of many possible platforms or methods for doing non-voting tasks (e.g. how news of the annual general membership meeting is transmitted).

Read this far?

If you even skimmed this whole post, you might be someone who’d enjoy doing similar administrative and infrastructural leadership with us! Keep an eye on ACH’s blog for our next nominations/election cycle announcement (late fall 2025 or early 2026), which will include calls for new council reps, Vice President/President Elect (can be a pair of people working together as co-VPs, as we’ve done the last few years), and Deputy Secretary (to partner with our secretariat, when our current Deputy Secretary moves into the Secretary role Summer 2026).