Rules of Procedure
The main aim of the rules of procedure of the Doctoral Convention (DC) are to establish a system of a representative democracy which simultaneously is flexible, thus offering many opportunities to get involved, accounts for the diversity of doctoral researchers, and is robust enough to make important decisions in a reasonable amount of time. The work of DC rests on three main columns:
Current rules of procedure of the Doctoral Convention
Legal framework
The DC is meant to serve as a new form of representation of all doctoral researchers at Heidelberg University. Prior to the foundation of the DC, the doctoral researchers had no formal legal status as a group and were represented only by the University administration and the regular students. Beginning with 2015, the State University Law of Baden-Württemberg was changed to include the requirement for an official, mandatory body that represents doctoral researchers at a university.
The doctoral researchers are free to determine the structure and organization of the DC themselves. The first rules of procedure of the DC in Heidelberg were created by the agDOCs, a working group that was established for this purpose in March 2015, and which consisted of doctoral researchers from almost all faculties of the University. On November 26th, 2015, the rules of procedure were accepted by the constitutive assembly of the DC.
