Steve, Thanks for the interest in the US Local Chapter and expressing your concern about the elections. Let me see if I can address your concerns in this mail.
The working group that is working to create the United States local chapter has made a lot of progress, but to go any further, it needs to incorporate as a legal entity. Doing that requires a board of directors. The working group (the group that meets on the call) decided that the most fair way to do this was to hold an informal election. It's an informal election because there aren't any true members yet, so the criteria by which someone was able to vote had to be chosen. It's also not a secret ballot. SurveyMonkey was chosen because it served our needs. Originally, Kate, who was leading the calls, was going to run the election, but since she's been unavailable for the last month (due to the crisis in Haiti), I've been running the calls, acting as secretary, and running the election. Kate is also overseeing the election, which is why all nominees had to contact both myself and Kate, and Kate will oversee the results on SurveyMonkey along with me. Circling back, we've discussed the voting procedure on the calls. It's been a major area for discussion: ensuring that the new organization is created in a way that's fair and transparent. We've discussed voting mechanisms, schemes, the length of time we'd give people to vote, etc. Each issue was discussed until there was unanimous consent in how we'd proceed. If even one person had any question, or objection- we didn't move forward. In addition to discussions within the working group, we've announced the election process on the talk-us list several times, and I've been sending out regular notifications about the election process for the last several weeks in order to let folks know where the working group was at, what it was planning, and to solicit feedback from the larger community. We've also been increasing the amount of communication the working group has had with the larger community in order to try to bring more parties onto the call. This is the election process that's been selected for this first board. Once there is an actual organization, it will open up membership and a board can be elected by the members. We've done our best to make the process as fair and as transparent as we could. Again, Kate is overseeing the election along with me. That reduces the chances that one of us could taint the election. If that doesn't satisfy your concerns, the other option available to us would be to release the votes once they're collected. I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, it increases transparency (and people could do their own tallies), but on the other, someone may not want their votes out for all to see. This issue would need to be discussed during the next working group call, this Thursday at 8pm EST/5pm PST. Lastly, I want to re-emphasize that this election is for the board that will serve temporarily, and that there will be a true election later this year. - Serge _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
