Voting / Associate Membership

[Frank Warmerdam]

Arnulf Christl wrote:
> ARTICLE I Purposes of the Corporation; Non-Profit Status
> on:
> http://www.fossgis.de/osgeo/index.php/Draft_OSGEO_Bylaws
> 
> We should probably move this to stable asap, currently it does not say 
> this clearly yet:
> 
> https://www.osgeo.org/content/governance/foundation/members/membership.html

Arnulf,

I don't think we should be moving the bylaws to stable (or better
yet to the osgeo.org web site) till they have been adopted.  If there
are no substantial issues perhaps we will be able to accomplish this on
Monday.

 >Chris writes:
>> I also think we're going to have to really think through how to make 
>> those who don't get 'elected', those who aren't 'members' feel included. 

Arnulf writes:
> This should be a major effort and be addressed parallel to the 
> nomination, voting and presentation of results. Basically whoever wants 
> to do something can do so using the Wiki. I have seen the term do-ocracy 
> come up again and again, seconding, enhancing and extending the term 
> meritocracy that was part of the idea of the foundation right from the 
> start.

I concur.

I would really like to see us in a position to have associate members
as soon as possible, and to make the associate member role reasonably
formal.  We should be collecting names and contact information for all
members and associate members. I would like a public membership list
something like:

   Members of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation
   ================================================

Members listed with a (v) after their name are voting members, all
members without the (v) are associate members.

Aardvark Jones
Arnulf Christl (v)
...

ie. the point being to try as much as possible to treat all members
as members, with the voting distinction being a minor addendum.

How soon could we have an associate member signup thingy on the web
site Daniel?


> Anyway, a good thing will be to stress the fact that down to earth work 
> is involved in being an actively representing part of the Foundation.
> 
> == Non Voting Members ==
> Still - every nominated member that is *not* elected will be *outside* 
> of the Foundation altogether as everybody else who did not even bother 
> to try to get nominated. This is downright harmful! It is therefore very 
> important to implement a meaningful member status for active 
> "non-voting-members" or "friends-of-the-foundation".

Right.  Per the draft bylaws this is called associate member.

> == Wiki Use ==
> In my interpretation the group of "active non-voting-members" is 
> currently represented by the growing user list of the Wiki.
> 
> But the URL is a strange .de, second level dir and still not public. We 
> are not publishing it because it has not been resolved yet by the BOD 
> how to do it. It would take me a few minutes only to get it known in 
> around 50 OSGIS channels - but I didn't do this yet because we never 
> sorted out whether to leave it outside the CN infrastructure, switch URL 
> or whatever?!
> 
>  From what I recollect Frank suggested that the pre fossgis might not 
> harm anybody. That it is remote from the official CN makes it better to 
> encourage editing and differentiates it from stable documents. So what 
> to do about this?
> 
> Maybe I should add these topics to the next BOD meeting?

Note that I have been pointing people to stuff in the wiki in
#osgeo and on the discuss list.  I think we have just been hesitant
to promote directly on the main web site.

My hope is that the Web Committee will be able to address how to move
the wiki within .osgeo.org within the next few weeks after which point
we might be more aggressive about encouraging it's use.

> Not just that. I think it is a pity that your textss are too long to 
> read. Not many will really read through them, so the hits your pages 
> collect are no indication that people really read it. This is sad but 
> true. We are collectively educated to collect information that fits on 
> one screen at maximum, 800 by 600 res. I have no idea how to address 
> this and it might well keep us busy for the next years trying to find out.

I can't believe you are saying this after your huge wiki advocacy post!

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent