A Message From Dr. Neil Faulkner
Dear SHARPie
The General Meeting on Saturday 29 March was attended by 51 people, including trustees, committee members, team members, and many established volunteers. All points of view were represented and fully discussed. It was probably the most representative meeting in the history of the project.
It also produced very clear results. The meeting agreed the following general principles of governance:
- All volunteers with a recent history of work on the project will be considered members
- An
- A Committee
(incorporating Trustees) will be elected by the
- A working party (formed
of four members who volunteered at the meeting) will prepare a
revised constitution reflecting agreed principles for submission
to the next
A new Committee was elected (46 in favour, 1 against, 4 people having left): Terry Baxter, Anj Beckham, Gareth Davies, Neil Faulkner (Chair), Sally Faulkner, Brenda Huggins, Lynn Jollans (Secretary), Chris Mackie, Christine Morton, Linda Nudds, Gary Rossin (Treasurer), Mike Nudds, Ann Smith, and Kelvin Smith.
The project’s officers,
trustees, and committee-members now consist only of the above-named
elected representatives. This committee will now lead the project
and organise the 2008 summer season. It was the overwhelming
decision of the meeting that SHARP should not be run by a small
unelected board of trustees or by unelected officers. This decision
is now embodied in the new Committee. There are now no other
officers, trustees, or committee-members except those elected at the
General Meeting. I stress this so that it is clear that the decision
of the meeting is final, the dispute about the governance of the
project is over, and the new Committee will now be working a) to
organise the new season, b) to organise an
The SHARP Directors asked
the General Meeting to support our proposed list for the Committee
in order to ensure that we had a united Committee to serve until the
next
Our written constitution has never reflected our practice. There are also gaps and ambiguities that leave it open to alternative interpretations. Some readings have interpreted it as a profoundly undemocratic document. This is highly contradictory, since the charity’s aim is to support the archaeological project, and the archaeological project is a high profile experiment in democratic archaeology. This requires a little further comment.
There has been much talk of late about ’the law’ and ’the charity commissioners’ in relation to our written constitution. Our overriding obligation as a charity is to manage our affairs in such a way that resources are used to carry out the aim for which the charity exists. The dispute about governance meant that we could not function and therefore could not carry out our aim. The new Committee will now fulfill our charitable obligation by carrying out the aim of the project – which is to investigate the history and archaeology of Sedgeford parish, and to do this as a volunteer-run, community-based, democratically-structured experiment in public archaeology.
This is not new. The preamble to our constitution as published on the SHARP website states that ’the Project is an exercise in democratic archaeology, believing that all those who participate have an equal say in how the Project is run … ’; and we have published several papers on this subject. Democracy is not divisible. Either SHARP is controlled by everyone from below, or it is controlled from above by an unelected board. An unelected board which occasionally ’permits’ others to have a say is not a democracy. Democracy exists only when the power of final decision lies with the many, not the few.
Many people have been become frustrated by what they have seen as ’bickering’ and ’personality clashes’ over the last four months. I share the frustration – I have, after all, received a lion’s share of abuse – but I believe that we had no choice but to contest the attempt to place control of SHARP in the hands of a small unelected board of trustees, in order to preserve its democratic character and academic integrity. I also believe that, had we not done so, the project may well have ended, if for no other reason than that key senior colleagues would probably have resigned – and I would have understood and felt obliged to support their decision to do so.
The matter is settled. It remains only to agree a revised written constitution. The project, of course, remains open to contributions from everyone. Our plans for the 2008 season are as follows:
- A second year of
evaluation trenches on
- A post-excavation programme on 1996-2007 fieldwork in full gear. As well as work on human remains, animal bones, pottery, and small finds, we will have a complete set of digitised plans for Boneyard-Reeddam ready for use.
Our main published result
from last year is an eight-page interim report on 2005-2007 which
has just appeared in
Lastly, my warm thanks to everyone who made the effort to attend the General Meeting. The large attendance, the strong support, and the clear decisions have saved the project and enabled us to move forwards. The meeting seemed to end with a tangible surge of enthusiasm and energy, which bodes well for the future. We will be actively looking for new members of both Committee and Team during the summer season this year: the signs are that we will find them.
Best wishes and see you in the summer,
Neil