Alan Coopersmith wrote: > Some thoughts on e-mail votes now that we've had our first one - perhaps > we should formalize these into a policy. > > The constitution says: > > 6.6. Quorum and Voting. A majority of the current OGB members in office > shall > constitute a quorum for the transaction of business. The vote of a > majority of the OGB members present at a meeting at which a quorum is > present shall be the act of the OGB. > > 6.9. Action Without a Meeting. Any action required or permitted to be taken > at a meeting of the OGB may be taken without a meeting if all the > members > of the OGB consent thereto in writing, and such writing is filed > with the > minutes of the proceedings of the OGB. Such consent shall have the > same > effect as a unanimous vote. > > Perhaps this is another legalese that escapes me, but I'm assuming the last > statement does not mean that consenting to vote by e-mail does not indicate > a vote in favor and that e-mail votes must thus be unanimous.
Hrm... I can see how that can be interpreted as such - but I don't believe email votes should be unanimous. > I would say that the act of filing a vote of yea, nay, or abstain is > automatically granting consent for a vote via e-mail, and thus the only Makes sense. > times in which a OGB member needs to explicitly give consent for a vote > should be: > > 1) when they wish to allow a vote, but not cast even an abstain (the > ARC's > have traditionally allowed a fourth vote type of "Not Participating" > which > is effectively the same as being absent for the vote - it does not > count > towards the total used to determine a majority of votes cast, and is > generally used when the member was not able to be present for a > review nor > catch up offline, and thus feels they don't have enough information to > vote). Huh, I hadn't heard of that before - I like it though... > 2) When they know in advance they will be unable to access e-mail for an > extended period (more than a couple of days) and wish to send a message > in advance granting blanket permission for the remaining OGB members to > conduct any e-mail votes they see fit during their absence. A quorum > of members would still be needed to vote yea, nay or abstain in > order to > conduct business, so with the current board of 7 members, no more > than 3 > at a time could do this (and hopefully more than 1 at a time will be > rare). Makes sense to me. > For the votes themselves, should we require they be signed via PGP or > S/MIME > so that outsiders can't forge e-mails, or do we just assume OGB members > will > notice and speak up quickly enough if a vote is cast in their name? I'd prefer the latter.. cheers, steve -- stephen lau // stevel at sun.com | 650.786.0845 | http://whacked.net opensolaris // solaris kernel development
