[Board] Regarding MOT5: Accept nominations for President and Vice-President from members with experience on the board
Cameron Shorter
cameron.shorter at gmail.com
Sat Nov 5 14:39:04 PDT 2016
Board,
I like the idea of drawing on the skills within the OSGeo Community to
support the activities of the board, however I suggest the best approach
to achieve that is to reduce the number of roles and scope of
responsibility.
If the President and Board have too much work to do, there are a few
different approaches which can be taken:
1. Ask our board / president(s) to work harder. The board is already
hard working, and asking more of them results in burn out and people
leaving. This is not viable long term.
2. Increase the board workforce by increasing number of roles,
effectively increasing hierarchy in the process. This is sub-optimal in
a volunteer driven organisation, as volunteers become dis-empowered,
expecting someone with an official title to do a particular job.
3. De-scope the responsibilities of the board/president, creating space
for volunteers to step up with initiates. This leaves the
board/president to be mostly just providing rubber stamping of the great
initiatives from within the volunteer community. I think this path of
community empowerment and a flatter hierarchy holds the most promise.
Volunteers work best as a Do-ochracy/Merit-ochracy. Language we want to
see on our email lists should be:
/"I've got this idea, I'd like to do <xxx>. What do you think?"/
/"Great idea, have you thought about <xxx>."/
/"Great idea, I can help you with <xxx>."/
Language which doesn't work as well:
/"<xxx> is broken. <yyy> should implement ..."/
/"Why isn't the <xxx> group doing <yyy>?"/
/"We should create/delegate <xxx> responsibility to <yyy> group."
/
If there are no volunteers stepping up to implement an idea, it is
typically crowd wisdom feedback saying the idea needs some work, or is
not viable.
Thoughts?
Cameron
On 5/11/2016 8:04 PM, Massimiliano Cannata wrote:
>
> My position on this MOT5 is that the president and vice-president
> should be selected among the board of directors.
>
> There is no clue and legal basis for deciding that "members with
> experience on the board" are eligible while others don't: anybody
> could have great leader ship: or are we a closed community?
>
> Moreover there's a dissociation between the president role and the
> decision making process in the case he's not a current director.
>
> Moreover if you've not been elected in the board it means that you
> have not been trusted enough to have a decisional role in our
> community (I also speak for myself here :-) ).
>
> OSGeo siempre ;-)
>
> Maxi
>
>
> Il 05 nov 2016 3:14 AM, "Venkatesh Raghavan"
> <raghavan at media.osaka-cu.ac.jp <mailto:raghavan at media.osaka-cu.ac.jp>>
> ha scritto:
>
> Dear Board,
>
> I prefer that discussion on such matters take place on the board
> mailing list to which more than a hundred of our members
> (with or without board experience) are subscribed rather that
> on loomio where only 10 of our members have currently joined.
>
> My view on "MOT5: Accept nominations for President and Vice-President
> from members with experience on the board"
>
> a) To the best of my knowledge, the board has not set any precedence
> wherein the President was not an member elected by our charter
> members.
>
> b) OSGeo regional Vice-President was new position that was created
> in January 2016 with the aim of sharing the workload with
> the President and board. There is no precedence of Vice-Presidents
> being
> appointed from outside of our elected* board membership.
>
> (*In some instances we have the precedence of board member
> vacancies being filled in by members who had secured highest number
> of votes among the candidates who contested for the election
> but had not been been elected)
>
> c) We also do not have a precedence of calling for nominations
> from outside the Board to fill in the positions of President and
> newly created positions of regional Vice-Presidents.
>
> d) I feel that for the smooth conduct of the day-to-day affairs
> of OSGeo, the President and regional Vice-Presidents should
> be members *elected* to the board who can cast their valid vote
> on motions brought before the board.
>
> e) Our bylaws do permit us to appoint officers to our committees
> from our charter members (as in the case of Treasurer, Secretary,
> Project Officers, Committees) or even outside of the charter
> membership.
>
> f) I am all for making full use of the rich experience and tremendous
> capabilities of charter members (with or without board experience).
> However, I would like to reiterate my view of the President and
> regional
> Vice-President being appointed by the board from among the elected
> board members.
>
> In light of the above, I strongly disagree with "MOT5:
> Accept nominations for President and Vice-President from
> members with experience on the board" and suggest that we
> continue with our existing practice of appointing the OSGeo President
> and regional Vice-Presidents from among the elected board
> members.
>
> I have pasted a link of this mail to the MOT5 thread currently
> being voted on loomio and have also voted on MOT5 expressing
> my (strong) disagreement to MOT5 on loomio.
>
> Lastly, I feel that loomio can be used for voting and keeping
> a public record of our motions, but the discussions on motions
> can be on the open (in rare cases private) board mailing list.
>
> Best
>
> Venka
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
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--
Cameron Shorter
M +61 419 142 254
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