NMSAAM Governance Documents

NMSAAM Governance Documents and Updates

The New Mexico Society for Acupuncture and Asian Medicine has made the decision to host/house our public governance documents on GitHub The reasons for this inlcude:

1. Files can be in plain text (markdown) which will be accessible for decades to come and are able to be opened on any computer/OS/program built since about the 1970s
2. GitHub/Git is a version control system which intrinsically tracks and preserves change history to documents
3. GitHub is a large site with built-in redundancy, it is very unlikely that data will be lost
4. The version control features of GitHub allow for collaboration and member input, without obscuring what is the official version of any document

Open Governance

Using a feature of github called GitHub Pages our documents are presented to the public as a webpage. This does not mean that the documents are written in HTML. The markdown is converted into html for presentation. Markdown is a format that is designed to be readable in both plain-text/raw format and easily transformed into html or other formats. For example, the NMSAAM By-laws are available on the governance site, but also here is a version in nmsaambylaws in MS Word that that was generated directly from the markdown file.

Here are some links, including the link to our governance documents

1. More about markdown
2. NMSAAM Governance Website
3. Github Repository

What the Governance Site is Not

The governance site is not a replacement for our main site, nmsaam.org Updates for the general profession, including our work with the American Society of Acupuncturists (ASA) will continue to be posted here! It is not a place for secretive or privileged communication between a select few NMSAAM members. Everything on the site, including change history/version-control is publicly accessible.

What You Will Find at the Governance Site

1. Updates on/from the Governance Committee itself
2. Announcements of NMSAAM Board meetings (which will be announced here in the members only section as well)
3. Updates on other internal NMSAAM Committees, primarily of interest to NMSAAM members participating in/on those committees
4. Position statements or announcements relating primarily to the governance of The Society

NMSAAM Webmaster, Steven Malins DOM, welcomes any comments, questions, concerns regarding the governance website. He can be contacted via email at webmaster@twilighteve.com or the governance committee email governance@nmsaam.org You can download the entire governance website from GitHub (link above) by clicking on “code” and “Download Zip”. If you prefer, you can raise issues with the site itself, the by-laws, or any document/page on the site thr