Why your General Assembly's amendment process is broken (and it's not your fault)

A colleague walked into my office one afternoon with a very specific request. He was managing amendments for a Congress Preparatory Committee — a serious responsibility, weeks of work ahead — and he'd heard there was software for this. The European Commission used something. Could I install it?

I went to look.

What I found was a monumental piece of enterprise software. Complex installation requirements, heavy infrastructure, designed for institutions with dedicated IT departments and procurement cycles measured in months. For a lean team preparing a congress, it was completely unusable. A sledgehammer for a task that needed a scalpel.

So I asked him to show me exactly what he was doing.

The Word table that ate his evenings

His workflow went like this.

He had a base text — the kind of foundational document that gets debated at every serious congress. He'd split it into sections and built a Word table to track everything. When amendments arrived by email — and they arrived constantly, from delegates across multiple countries — he copied each one manually into the table. He placed it in the right section. He italicised the proposed new text. He bolded whatever was being replaced. He tracked who submitted it, when, and what the current status was.

Every. Single. One. By hand.

When an amendment was updated or withdrawn, he updated the table. When two amendments conflicted, he noted it manually. When the document changed, he sometimes had to rebuild sections of the table from scratch.

It wasn't a workflow. It was an act of endurance.

Why this happens in every organisation

Here's the thing: he wasn't doing it wrong. He was doing it the only way available to him.

This is the standard in associations, federations, trade unions, and NGOs across Europe. Not because organisations are behind. Not because the people running these processes lack skill or rigour. But because the tools were never built for this specific need.

Enterprise governance software — when it exists at all — is built for large institutions with the resources to deploy and maintain it. General-purpose tools like Word or Google Docs were designed for documents, not for amendment workflows. So organisations improvise. They build elaborate tables. They develop personal systems. They rely on the discipline and memory of one person — usually the one who built the table in the first place — to hold the whole thing together.

It works. Until it doesn't. Until the volume grows, the deadline gets closer, and the person holding it all together is working at midnight trying to reconcile two conflicting versions of Article 7.

The moment that changes the question

I built my colleague a small local application to solve his immediate problem. It helped. But it couldn't manage external contributions, didn't support team collaboration, had no vote tracking, no audit trail. It solved one person's problem in one congress.

That afternoon in my office, I stopped thinking about the software he'd asked for — the Commission's monolith — and started thinking about the actual problem underneath it.

The problem isn't that organisations lack discipline. The problem is that the amendment process has always been treated as a document management task, when it is actually a structured collaboration workflow with very specific rules, sequences, and outputs.

Once you see it that way, the solution becomes obvious.

But that's a conversation for another post.

If this resonates with something you've experienced in your organisation, the waitlist for Amendly is open at amendly.eu. No commitment — just a place to follow what we're building.