[Board] Some food for thought from Directions magazine ahead of our board meeting

[Markus Neteler]

On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Venkatesh Raghavan
<raghavan at media.osaka-cu.ac.jp> wrote:
> Michael,
>
> On 2012/01/07 12:02, Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
> ....
>
>> I have heard a few time about the perceived lack of diversity on the
>> board.  The latest elected charter members I think reflects a change
>> there (it would be nice if someone could run some statistics on that)
>> -- beyond that, can you make some specific suggestions as to how we
>> might address your concerns?
>
>
> I think I have made several specific suggestions before;

Some related inline comments below:

> 1) Retire Charter Members who did not vote for 3 consecutive years

Yes - and this has been previously discussed:
http://www.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2011-November/009879.html

> 2) Assign more responsibilities to Charter Members rather then
> making them only vote for OSGeo Board and new Charter Member
> elections.

As a former board member and longest term charter Member
I agree. More responsibilities to Charter Members means more
interest for sure.

> 3) Have Charter Members vote on crucial issues

As a starter it could even be polls... Drupal or limesurvey
should be fine to implement the technical part easily.

> 4) OSGeo Board Members can update their views of
> role of Charter Members in the Wiki page that you
> requested to be created
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_charter_member_page_instruction

I'll take liberty to add this email to the related talk page.

> 5) Set up an Advisory Committee comprising of members
> form within and outside OSGeo. These members could
> be from Academia, Government, intergovernmental
> organizations and charitable foundations. The role
> would be to evaluate our performance since 2006
> and suggest where and how we should be heading
> in 2015. Such an Advisory Committee could work with the present
> OSGeo Board to formulate "OSGeo - Vision 2020" that could be
> presented at FOSS4G2012.

This is a very interesting idea.

> 6) Bring out the "OSGeo-2011 Executive Report from the President"
> and also for subsequent years.
>
> 7) Approve and publish the OSGeo Budget for 2010 and 2011
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Budget_2010
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Budget_2011
> are still drafts

I do believe that these documents should be updated to the
approved versions.

> 8) Spend funds to keep teh OSGeo web-site up-to-date.
> For example, most of the translation are out of date. Better to remove
> them and show links to language/regional chapter pages.

Another non-voting +1.

Best
Markus