Brooklyn CB1's bylaws are...a mess!
ALL CAPS // typos // no tabs // variable text alignment // a scanned, non-searchable PDF // expired provisions
You can find a current copy of Brooklyn CB1’s bylaws here. You can find a quickly cleaned up, legible version of them that I made here.
In my last post outlining the Community Board Bylaws Survey, I wrote:
“Properly, CB bylaws should be public, accessible, legible, and well-written. Not just for members of the public who want to know how their CB works, but for CB members themselves! How can CB members, especially new ones, be expected to operate well without accessible bylaws? That’s like asking someone to play a game but refusing to give them the rulebook.”
So let’s take an initial look at the bylaws of my community board, Brooklyn CB1.
Bylaws Survey Ranking, Accessibility Score: 39th out of 59
The first thing to note: in my preliminary accessibility score—which evaluated being up to date, having a table of contents, and being legible—it ranked last of all published bylaws.
In fact, it was the only set of published bylaws to earn a score of zero. The rest of the zeroes were given to the CBs that didn’t publish bylaws at all.
The next stage of the Bylaws Survey project will look into deep detail at the provisions of each CB’s bylaws, and this is already underway. For now, I’ll explain a bit more about how I analyzed Brooklyn CB1 in this first round.
Are the bylaws legible?
Legibility is “the quality of being clear enough to read.”
This is highly important for government documents, because people are already predisposed to not read them. So if you get someone who does manage to find them, and then they’re unreadable, you’ve snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. In this respect, legibility is vital for a self-governing society.
Many elements impact whether or not a document is readable, including:
What font do you use?
What are the margin sizes? Are there columns of text?
Is the text aligned left, right, center, or justified?
Do you use tabs and lists to indicate hierarchical relationships within the information you’re displaying?
Are there diagrams to illustrate processes? Some things are better said with relational shapes, not paragraphs.
Is the document written well? Does it have reasonable sentence structure? Is it proofread?
In most respects, the bylaws of Brooklyn CB1 are not legible. Why?
It’s written in all caps! By itself, that is enough to destroy the readability of the document. Whether or not people realize, they are trained to look for capital letters to help them separate sentences and ideas. But that only works if capital letters operate in contrast to lowercase ones. CB1 has the only set of all-caps bylaws that I found—it’s highly atypical.
The document alternates between being left-aligned and justified. This means that the spacing between words fluctuates from paragraph to paragraph, and that the right edge of paragraphs alternate between being flush with the margin, and variable based on each line of text.
There are no nested tabs. This means your eye can’t just tell what information is hierarchically related to other information. But even worse—the space between the text and each listed item varies!
There is no consistent heading style. Information is bolded and underlined in variable ways throughout the document.
There are typos and misspelled words. Typos happen to the best of us, and you can even find inconsistencies in the New York City Charter. But CB1’s bylaws have rogue punctuations that, on top of everything else, really make this document impossible to read. Expand the image below and read section (A). You’ll get hit with a surprise comma at the end of line two that makes you expect a clause you’ll need to hold in your head until the next comma. And then there isn’t one.
Sentences are structured tortuously. In the image below, most of that paragraph is one sentence, and that sentence doesn’t even end with a punctuation mark. Elsewhere throughout the bylaws, due to bad punctuation and sentence structure, we experience what Mark Twain called Parenthesis distemper.1 This is when dependent clauses are stacked one after the other, forcing you to hold them all in your head while you wait for the sentence to finish.
It is a scanned, non-searchable PDF. You cannot search the bylaws with control+F, because they are not searchable. The PDF is a scanned physical page. In a document as hard to read as this, you’d often want to jump back to other sections to check your understanding. But you can’t easily do that without control+F. Other CBs have bylaws like this, which isn’t great, but you can at least read them plainly—you cannot do that with these.
Are the bylaws up to date?
There are two ways that bylaws can be out of date:
They contain expired provisions, or provisions that no longer apply.
They contain processes that do not reflect the current best state of technology and administrative practice.
For the purposes of my first, preliminary bylaw survey, I only scored bylaws on obviously expired provisions. But, in any case, CB1’s bylaws are out of date by both standards above.
As you’ll have seen from the previous section, there are specific election provisions from 2020 and 2021 hardcoded into the bylaws. Well, it’s 2023 and they’re still there. All they’re doing now is making the bylaws harder to read, and making any reader question what else is wrong and needs to be excised.
Separately, the bylaws specify that notification should be done by mail and certified mail at various points.2
I know that CB1 uses email for various things, so one of two things is true here: they are still using mail for regular board member notification as a default (very inefficient, slow, and expensive), or they are not obeying their own bylaws and are just using email (you have to obey the bylaws! If you ignore one provision, why not ignore any provision?).
There’s no reason for default physical mail requirements in modern CBs. Other CB bylaws often just have a section like this, excerpted from Manhattan CB6’s bylaws (XI. Internal Operation of Community Board, section B):
Email shall serve as an appropriate method of sending notice to Board members in accordance with the Bylaws and for any other purpose, unless a member expressly requests otherwise.
More bylaws examination to come
This post gives you an idea of how I evaluated bylaws for accessibility, although more work remains to be done.
But the point of this post isn’t just to say “look how bad these bylaws are!” That’s not good self-government in a free society. I don’t know why CB1’s bylaws are like this, but I do know that they need to be otherwise, so I made a cleaned up version for everyone. It’s just a first draft, and it can be much better, but it’s at least legible for now!
This phrase comes from “The Awful German Language,” an 1880 essay by Twain. You can find it at the link, or in Appendix D in Twain’s A Tramp Abroad.
VI(F), VI(G), VIII(C), XIII