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Topic
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SC meeting, June 2024.
Motion 2 is that anyone at the meeting declares if they are recording.
Visitor appreciates that they do not have to answer such a question and declines to answer.
2 SC members walk out leaving another SC member as their substitute.From an SC of seven.
A meeting where 4 elected members showed up in person and two elected members send subbies since what we call “Fight Night” (the SC meeting of Sept 2023)
The other one was just an apology.
There is a quorum of 4 so game on.
The 4 elected members accept the 2 subbies so we now have 6 SC members for the meeting.
Then we have two walk outs because they are paranoid someone might be recording.
The pair make the Sec their subbie, the meeting accepts this, so the Sec now holds 3 votes, the Chair 1, and the other two subbies one each.
We end up with two elected members, one of whom holds two extra votes, and 4 substitute members.
All this at the last meeting for this particular SC; AGM in a few weeks.
Paranoid and dysfunctional management.PhD anyone?
Turned out to be a really good meeting due to the absence of the walk outs so should I even highlight the crazy dysfunction?Yes there was a quorum at all times and before there are a million posts about the Surveillance Devices Act s 7 let me just say there are exemptions from that so yes it is illegal to record the meeting but only if an exemption does not apply.
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IMHO, there’s nothing wrong with recording a conversation (including a meeting) that you’re at. The only wrong I can think of is breaching intellectual property rights. However, committee members are volunteers and have no basis for reserving intellectual property rights.
And I can’t see that a motion asking people with recording equipment to confess has much weight. The committee can make decisions about the OC’s matters, not individual owners where are entitled to observe the committee meeting.
I may be wrong but I believe the law on recording others’ conversations is that you can’t do it without their knowledge, but that doesn’t require their permission. Permission is effectively granted if the person being recorded continues speaking after being told they are being recorded.
I can see circumstances where a strata committee might want to record meetings, especially where there is a disruptive member or guest. The question of intellectual property rights is irrelevant unless the person doing the recording was planning to distort and misuse or commercialise the recording.
If I am correct on the permission/information question, the guest at the meeting who declined to say whether or not they were recording was sailing close to the wind if they then continued to record, as they haven’t informed those present that they were being recorded.
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I believe the appropriate course of action would be to ask the visitor to leave the meeting. If they refused to leave the meeting, then the meeting is adjourned.
I know I have said this many times before but it would help greatly if the strata committee had a reasonable set of standing orders established by a by-law, to make them enforceable. Then the committee could issue a note to the owners saying the meeting had been adjourned because [named owner] had refused to abide by the by-laws.
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I may be wrong but I believe the law on recording others’ conversations is that you can’t do it without their knowledge, but that doesn’t require their permission. Permission is effectively granted if the person being recorded continues speaking after being told they are being recorded.
Turns out I was kind of wrong, but every state has their own version of laws on recording voices, which you can find HERE. You need everyone being recorded’s permission in some states, and one person’s permission, if they are participating in the conversation, in others.
However, I think you could still argue that someone continuing to speak, after you have told them you are recording, may be considered de facto permission.
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We had a big, contentious project up for lengthy discussion. One cantankerous person stated up front he intended to record it as he believed was his right (as usual, no one knew the legislation so didn’t press back) and disclosing that it was so he could ponder the details discussed and respond in depth later based precisely on what was said by attending experts. Seemed reasonable and he did so without objection. So I think in most cases if you air your intentions and provide reasonable reasons you would probably get away with it. But having done so you might need to prove everyone’s trust for not misusing it was warranted. As with many things, this too can be a bit of a storm in a tea cup issue and soon forgotten about.