--On Wednesday, October 20, 2010 06:16:01 PM -0400 Tom Keiser
<[email protected]> wrote:
Agreed. We can easily fall into the single vote-taker situation when,
for example, an the outgoing incumbent is nominated for re-election,
or a chair vacates their seat during the election. While I think I
can trust everyone involved, the mere appearance of impropriety could
put a cloud over the standards process. A two-out-of-three
requirement seems like a good balance of redundancy and verification.
I'm mostly a proponent of defining a limited amount of process, with as
much in public as possible, selecting good leaders, trusting them to do
their jobs, and cleaning up later if/when there is a problem. I've seen
organizations of various sorts (including one decent-sized SDO) try too
hard to cover every case in process and over-micro-manage their leadership,
and it doesn't work as well.
However, elections are an interesting case, because we seem to desire a
secret ballot. Secrecy makes it impossible for anyone who doesn't have
access to the votes to verify the results, which makes it difficult to
discover not only fraud but honest mistakes. It also presents a redundancy
problem; if only one person has the votes and that person disappears....
I'll propose the following:
In normal operation, there will be three vote-takers. By default, both
standardisation group chairs and one AFS assigned numbers
registrar--to be chosen at the discretion of the registrars--shall
serve as vote-takers. If anyone serving as a vote-taker is nominated
and seconded for election, then they must either recuse themselves
from the vote-taking process, or reject the nomination. Whenever
vote-taking vacancies occur, the order of succession shall be: eligible
registrars, followed by nomination of any eligible person by the
remaining vote-taker(s). Vote-takers who are also eligible voters may
vote in the same manner as any other voter.
I'm not sure how I feel about putting the registrars in this role
permanently. Not that I'm opposed to serving in that role, if needed, but
I'm not sure whether or to what extent we care about maintaining
separation. That's something the community will have to decide.
I'm not entirely happy with the above: e.g. if multiple vote-takers
are nominated and seconded quasi-simultaneously, we can end up in a
position where we have one (or even zero) vote-takers
It should be very rare to have zero vote-takers, as a continuing chair
cannot meaningfully stand for election and a chair who has just resigned
presumably won't want to. If you do end up with no vote-takers and no
eligible registrars, the process of selecting new vote-takers can be done
in public, with no coordinator -- someone says "hey we need vote-takers"
and people start nominating; anyone who is nominated, seconded, and doesn't
decline becomes a vote-taker. If there are many more nominations than
needed, some will probably decline.
; should a
vote-taker be nominated, it doesn't stipulate how long they have to
reach a decision; etc.
Nominations need to be accepted or not before the call for votes can go
out, and the vote-takers don't have to be fixed until then. So, I don't
think there's a problem here.
I guess the key question is: how many corner
cases should the text cover?
Not too many. We do need to cover how to recover from a lack of leaders,
but as long as we have chairs and vote-takers, we can let them apply
judgement to corner cases.
-- Jeff
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