VEX U Club Model Bylaws

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
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I am helping to start a VEX U team at the University of Memphis. One of the requirements for becoming a Registered Student Organization at the UofM is that there has to be a draft of bylaws for the organization. I do not know where to start in drafting bylaws and was hoping other VEX U teams could share their bylaws with me so that I can have a starting point for drafting the bylaws. Thanks in advance.

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So my VexU team is not associated with a college so we don’t have bylaws, but I would suggest that you look at the bylaws of other organizations at your college to get an understanding of what your college wants to have in your bylaws.

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PM me your email and I can send you what I have from Kennesaw State University.

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At MCCC, the student government provided a sample “constitution and bylaws;” you should check to see if UofM has something similar. PM your email and I’ll send you a copy of ours.

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Purdue ACM SIGBots is a subgroup (technically a “Special Interest Group”) within our ACM chapter. ACM, as a registered student organization has an official constitution that largely follows Purdue’s boilerplate. You can find the Constitution at the bottom of the page linked here: - PURDUE UNIVERSITY | BoilerLink (pull up the 2017 version, the 2013 version is still linked for some reason).

While ACM has its own constitution for registering with the university, SIGBots has created its own set of bylaws in the last few years to ensure that we have a more specifically applicable set of rules. Our bylaws are broken down into the following four categories:

  • Membership
    This section covers the process of joining the team and the expectations of members/corresponding disciplinary processes. When running a competitive team with a lot of money in lab equipment, it’s important to make sure that people know how to keep things safe and maintained well.
  • Officer Positions and Expectations
    We have officers for each subteam within SIGBots (Mechanics, Software, Sys Admin, etc.), and this defines their roles. Makes it easier to keep people accountable and smoothes out leadership transitions.
  • The Officer Election Process
    This is, in my opinion, the most important part. A lot of clubs I’ve worked with handpick their replacement leaders or simply leave leadership vacuums, and that’s the biggest cause of organizations dying out. Make sure that there’s a defined process for officers leaving and entering the group.
  • Ammending the Bylaws
    Just find a balance between making it difficult enough to edit that someone can’t change the club singlehandedly but not making it so that the bylaws get in the way of competition.
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I helped start a club at my university. They required every club to have a constitution and let us basically copy and paste the SGA constitution with some minor alterations.

You might ask for an example of club by-laws at your school.

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