[FOSS4G-Oceania] Fwd: Governance

[John Bryant]

Thanks for clarifying! I totally understand where you are coming from.

I understand the idea of wanting to limit the board's potential to
interfere - it could potentially be quite frustrating for all involved, if
it were misused. But on the other hand, since (in this model) the board is
ultimately the body that wears the consequences if anything goes wrong,
there needs to be discretion to use judgement as to when intervention would
be appropriate.

I don't think a Conference Committee can determine when the board should
exercise its right to intervene. Hopefully very unlikely that a board would
need to intervene at all, but if they did, it would be helpful if the lines
of authority were made very clear. Putting limits on this authority
introduces a potentially complicated situation (a stalemate?) in the case
of disagreement.

Perhaps we could address this by communicating the intent & spirit as
guidance to the board, eg. '*The board should only intervene in the
activities of the Conference Committee if there is a clear reason to do so;
in general, a light touch is preferred.*' It feels like there's a low
probability of this kind of problem in our current transition, so hopefully
this is somewhat academic in the short term and can be refined over time.

Re: timing: from my point of view, we would ideally resolve the general
governance questions more immediately, act on them, and accept that
entity-forming questions might take a little longer to resolve. I'm hopeful
we can find consensus about a governance model before Christmas, and use
this consensus to move forward in the new year with resolve.

+1 to Greg's suggestion for a subcommittee/working group to explore
entity-forming issues and report back with a recommendation by end Jan 2019.
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