[Board] President elect and limiting terms

Sat Mar 23 17:28:50 PDT 2013

When I was on the board of GITA, they had the idea of a President Elect
also, and I think it worked well for continuity. Each year they would
choose a President Elect, who would become President in a year's time. They
could then work closely with the current President so that there was a
smooth transition. Also the former President would automatically stay on
the board for one more year, as Past President - so the President would be
on the board for at least three years (unless they stood down for some
reason), with the middle of those three being their term as the actual
President. I think this worked pretty well in terms of providing a
rotation, but also providing continuity.

We'd need to work out how whatever we did would fit in with our current
election process, which re-elects half of the board every year, with board
members having a term of two years. Currently the board chooses the
President from among its members, I don't know if that would still be how
it would work if we followed a "President Elect" model? Being President is
more of a commitment than just being on the board, so we'd need people to
specifically stand for President. If we still had basically the same scheme
as now, the board would need to choose a President Elect from among the
incoming board members, since they would be the only ones guaranteed to be
on the board for another two years. If we only had those 4 or 5 people to
choose from, it's quite possible that none of them would want to stand for
President. Especially if you are new to the board and don't really know how
it works, it's quite a big commitment to make (we didn't have a rush of
volunteers to be President when Arnulf stood down).

In practice it would probably make sense that someone should have been on
the board for a year at least before standing for President, so they have
some idea of what would be involved. I don't know that this should be an
absolute requirement, but it's something to think about.

So I like the idea in principle, but I think there are quite a few details
to think through in terms of how we would actually implement it, and we
might need other changes to how the board is elected, if we decided to go
that way,.

On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 5:58 PM, Cameron Shorter
<cameron.shorter at gmail.com>wrote:

> Arnulf,
> I see we were remiss not to cover the "President elect" topic in our last
> board meeting. Lets get it finalised by our next meeting.
>
> I'm in favour of creating a "President elect".
> I'm open to introducing suggested guidelines for a a president term, but
> would suggest avoiding hard requirements as we are not sure about the make
> up of future boards.
>
> Arnulf, once this conversation thread has died down, I suggest you draft a
> proposal for us to vote upon.
>
>
> On 24/03/13 00:05, Arnulf Christl wrote:
>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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>> Folks,
>> I just cast my ballot for the president and president elect of the IGS
>> and this reminded me of a task I did not conclude when still on the
>> board of OSGeo.
>>
>> My suggestion was to have a double election and add a president elect
>> / vice president to the game but we never got to actually talk this
>> through to the end. Having this in place would bring more continuity
>> to the organization and take some weight off the running president.
>>
>> So far this was not too much of an issue but before the end of my
>> presidency I did have to commit to several activities which would take
>> place after I had left. Fortunately Jeff could take on some of them
>> (thanks for this) and others were happy to have me give talks even
>> although I was then just a commoner.
>>
>> The second thing I had originally planned to bring to the board before
>> me term ended was to limit the term of the presidency to a fixed time
>> (after which there is no way of returning?). It appear that being
>> president elect for one year and then president for another is a good
>> idea. This would help the active presidents to end their term without
>> having to explain why. For me it was exceptionally painful to not run
>> for another presidency because there was this general sentiment that I
>> "step down" instead of just end a regular term. Which somehow required
>> me to give a reason which I sort of did but in an awkward and
>> unhelpful way. It felt like disappointing so many people and caused
>> more friction that necessary.
>>
>> Having a president elect role would also allow the individual to grow
>> into their position and take on the responsibility gradually, likewise
>> allow the president to take a holiday or drop off the grid for a while
>> without the organization appearing to be headless.
>>
>> My proposal to the board is to have a dialog about this. The more I
>> think about it the more of a no-brainer it seems to be and many
>> organizations do it that way. Nothing is permanent, everything is in a
>> flow and our organization should not be an exception. Having a
>> president and president elect allows to have smooth transition.
>>
>>
>> All the best,
>> Arnulf
>>
>> - -- Arnulf Christl
>> http://metaspatial.net
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>
>
> --
> 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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