> In any situation which draft-wilkinson-afs3-standardisation-00 does
> not anticipate or address, the vote-takers will apply common sense
> to determine an appropriate course of action.
Perfect. So let's apply the common sense, declare the election
ratified, and move forward.
Kim
On 11/15/2010 12:23 PM, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
--On Monday, November 15, 2010 11:09:59 AM -0700 Kim Kimball
<[email protected]> wrote:
I'm confused.
If we have rules for ourselves, we should follow them.
We don't. We're in a bootstrapping phase; to establish a charter we
need chairs, while to elect chairs we need a charter, or at least some
rules for an election. The registrars resolved this by asking for and
getting consensus for running the first elections under the rules
contained in Simon's draft charter. The entirety of anyone's
authority in this process derives from that consensus, and from
people's willingness to abide by its outcome, once we're done.
Unfortunately, those rules were incomplete in a number of ways, some
of which were not discovered until the process was underway, or
later. Many of the potential edge cases simply did not trigger. We
didn't lack for nominations; no one inadvertently revealed the status
of the ongoing eleection; we did't have all of the registrars accept
nominations, leaving no vote-takers. To name a few.
Unfortunately, we now have encountered an edge case the rules didn't
anticipate. The rules state that the election results must be
announced, independently by each vote-taker, within 7 days of the
close of voting. Two vote-takers did that, while the third did not
(and presently cannot, because he doesn't have access to his machines
containing the data, even though he is online). The rules we're
operating under don't say what happens in this case.
If they're in the way, which they are, they should either be
corrected or
abandoned.
Yes; there have been some discussions about how to improve the
elections process. Hopefully the lessons we've learned will be
applied as the group writes its permanent charter.
If there's a call for "is the election legit," I'm personally fine with
it and have been.
Yes, there is such a call, as stated in Doug's message, "Call for
consensus on the election of the co-chairs", and my followup, both
dated Nov 12.
I'm not fine with establishing rules and then discarding them,
regardless
of whether we're an organisation, a small group, a gaggle, murder, herd,
or flock.
We're not doing that. That said, especially in a small group such as
this, it is apprporiate for the group as a whole to override
particular rules when necessary, and I hope the permanent charter will
include an explicit provision to permit that.
To be clear...
In my message, "Call for Votes", sent on August 24, and speaking for
the registrars/vote-takers as a group, I wrote the following:
Because the elections process has never been used or tested before,
there
are inevitably some gaps which need to be filled. Additionally, we feel
the circumstances of bootstrapping call for special handling which is
not
fully spelled out in the provisional charter. Therefore, the
vote-takers
have taken several decisions regarding the process for the present
election _only_. It is our hope that once the election is concluded and
chairs are installed, the group will take what we have learned (and what
we will learn) into consideration when formulating its initial charter.
The decisions we've taken are as follows:
...
- In any situation which draft-wilkinson-afs3-standardisation-00 does
not anticipate or address, the vote-takers will apply common sense
to determine an appropriate course of action.
This is such a provision, and we're invoking that bullet point now.
In response to the community, Doug has issued a consensus call on
whether to accept the election results posted by Thomas and myself
without waiting for David's confirmation. Note that even if the
election results are _not_ accepted, under the lack-of-rules we have
so far, Doug has as much authority to do this as anyone else.
Applying common sense but also preferring to err on the side of
caution, the vote-takers plan to wait for the timer on this call to
run out, then make a determination as to its result and act accordingly.
-- Jeff
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