[Board] Executive Committee Proposal

[Cameron Shorter]

On 18/10/2012 9:19 AM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
>
>
>     1. What is not working with the current process, or how would
>     adding more people make the Exec Committee more effective?
>
> Frank, while I'm open to potentially progressing this motion at some 
> point, I'm still not seeing the value of expanding the Exec Committee. 
> In particular:
>
> Cameron,
>
> Are you referring to the option for the committee to add members to 
> itself?
Yes.
>
> The current process is problematic in the sense that it is hard for us 
> to make decisions quickly because we need quorum for board meetings 
> (or every last board member voting when doing it by email).

I'm in favour of adjusting our decision making / voting process such 
that it can be conducted over IRC/email/... . Something along the lines 
of: "All that is required for a motion to be passed is that we get votes 
from (All/Majority) of board members via the meeting or follow up on a 
publicly archived forum such as email."

>     2. I'm very wary of providing a committee with the responsibility
>     of delegating responsibility to a select person or group of
>     people. It is fraught with danger of accusations of favourtism, or
>     people's feelings being hurt for not being considered, or the
>     board just accepting everyone because they don't want to hurt
>     anyone's feelings.
>
>
> The board already has the right to delegate all sorts of things and
> does so.
>
> Is your concern that folks will want on the executive committee and
> be offended/concerned when they aren't appointed to it?  I'm not
> very clear how this is different than any other committee, PSC, etc
> in OSGeo.

The current process is that the majority of board discussions are done 
in public forums, and the public  contribute at times and are listened 
to. But at the end of the day, it is the board who make the final decision.
I think this process is working for us, and as yet haven't seen a reason 
for changing it.

With regards to delegation to committees: Joining a committee basically 
involves offering to help. The chair of the committee is a voted 
position (by the committee). This process mostly working (although the 
conference committee doesn't currently have a chair), and as yet I 
haven't seen a need for another level of committee hierarchy.

>
> I also wouldn't particularly mind removing the clause about the
> executive committee being able to extend itself but since we are
> already proposing to delegate the authority of the board to it for
> most purposes it would be able to do anything it wants to itself
> anyways since it has the authority to rework it's terms of reference.
So should we simplify the proposal to being that board decisions are 
allowed to be proposed and approved by email?


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com

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