Indeed as I informed the Board privately last night, in another
non-profit software org there is a hostile take-over trying to
happen...so our bylaws on elections are very important.
But if Venka and other Charter members want changes in the bylaws it
should be made possible, and considered strongly by the Board.
-jeff
On 2014-08-01 7:40 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
Venka,
Further to Jorge's email, the reason we need to vote in charter members
(rather than accepting everyone who applies) is to meet OSGeo bylaws
which state that we need to vote in new charter members every year.
The reason for the bylaws is to avoid hostile take-over. Admittedly very
unlikely, but still possible.
So we have changed our voting processes to try and be as inclusive as
possible, basically aiming to ensure that everyone who is interested,
and actively contributing toward OSGeo should be voted in for charter
membership.
On 2/08/2014 2:30 am, Jorge Sanz wrote:
2014-08-01 15:23 GMT+02:00 Venkatesh Raghavan
<[email protected]>:
What is the "voting" for, I though all the nominated members would be
automatically
elected. Perhaps I am the only one not aware of the new election rules.
Can you clarify please.
Venka
Hi Venka, thanks for raising the question.
On previous years the Board allocated a number of seats and if there
were more nominations than seats then elections were conducted, so
some people could not get the membership if they were at the end of
the ranking. Other years no election was needed because there were
less nominations than seats, so everyone was automatically accepted.
As was discussed in June[1], a new procedure was designed[2]. On this
new procedure, there is no limit of seats for new charter members, the
nominations are carried as every year but instead of having a number
of seats, we will have a different criteria for accepting new members.
Another difference is that instead of voting by e-mail, with 180
members, we will use an electronic voting system.
For every nominee, current Charter Members will have to decide say
"Yes", "No" or "Abstain" for their acceptance. This way we assure that
supported nominees are accepted. The criteria will be:
- The nominee needs to have more Yes than No
- The nominee needs to have more than 5% of Yes of voting members.
And then we arrive to one VERY important point in my opinion. For me,
the +1 and seconds on discuss mean a LOT, because maybe a I don't know
the nominee, but I know many of the nominators and seconders, and I
trust their criteria so they add points for me to vote a *Yes* instead
of an *Abstain*.
There are more than 60 nominations, so checking every nominee
discussion will take a while for Charter Members, but it's a very
important excercise to be responsible on our vote on who will be
accepted.
Sorry for the long mail, I hope it makes sense!!
Cheers
[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2014-June/thread.html
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Membership_Process
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