[Board] Added "OSGeo Charter Responsibilities"

Sun Aug 17 16:19:45 PDT 2014

Hi Venka,
Based on your comments, I've added the following to 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Membership_Process#Responsibilities
/"TBD: As of mid 2014, there has been some suggestions on board and 
discuss email lists about using web based voting tools to have OSGeo 
Charter members vote o specific OSGeo issues. Agreement and details are 
yet to be finalised./"

More inline:

On 16/08/2014 9:53 am, Venkatesh Raghavan wrote:
> Hi Jeff,
>
> On 2014/08/16 2:06, Jeff McKenna wrote:
>> Hi Venka,
>>
>> I agree, that the new Board should consider assigning more 
>> responsibilities to our Charter Members.  What potential types of 
>> "crucial issues" could you see involving the Charter Members down the 
>> road?  Do you have any examples?
>
> About "crucial issues" there a many, one of the recent example was the 
> new rules for
> Charter Member (CM) Election. I think that the rules of the CM 
> election needs a broad
> consensus from the membership and cannot be changed by board decision 
> alone.
> How can the board change the rules of CM elections when it is CMs 
> that  elect
> the board in the first place?

Venka, I agree that it is important for decisions from the OSGeo Board 
to be inclusive and draw upon the best opinions from within the OSGeo 
community.
However, excessive openness comes at a cost to the community due the 
time invested by each community member in describing an issue, 
understanding the issue, debating the issue, voting, then processing the 
votes.
A board needs to strike a balance between being open and encouraging 
input, verses taking responsibility and pragmatically making decisions 
on behalf of the community so the community can get on with what they 
enjoy and do best (such as writing code).

>
> With the revised election process item 6 [1], 5% vote of charter 
> membership to become CM
> is making the hurdle so low that it makes the whole election process 
> (one that Jorge has worked
> so very hard) a waste of time and effort. Can someone point me to a 
> volunteer organization
> where one could be elected  by getting mere 5% vote from the electorate?

Selecting a voting process is an example of overhead which has potential 
to draw people away from doing productive OSGeo activities.
The important thing for OSGeo is that a voting process exists. Yes, some 
options are better than others, but a near enough solution will suffice. 
100 people contributing might result in a better voting process. Indeed, 
20 or so people added valuable input into our latest voting process, 
which resulted in a better process than the original proposal. But is 
OSGeo significantly better because it has a better voting process? Or 
would OSGeo be more valuable if everyone had been focusing on improving 
their OSGeo projects instead?
>
> I suggest that the new board that will start functioning soon to 
> revisit CM election rules
> (which, I think, is a "crucial issue") and after seek broader 
> consensus from the charter members
> (through electronic voting of necessary) re-formulate these rules.

I think it would be good for the board to OCCASIONALLY consider inviting 
charter members to vote on an issue. However, engaging charter members 
should only be done rarely, say once or twice a year, and only after 
there has been time to debate and refine issues on osgeo-discuss. The 
board should be respecting the time of the OSGeo community, and in most 
cases, shoulder the responsibility and often time consuming task of 
making decisions on behalf of the community. That is what the board has 
been elected to do.

>
> Please note that I raise the issue about a process and not against any 
> individual.
> I am very pleased to see great new team of CM has entered OSGeo, I am 
> also glad
> to see the excellent list of nominees for the Board elections.
>
> Venka
>
> [1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Membership_Process_2014#Nominations
>
> P.S. I could have made my views on the new CM election rules earlier. 
> I did not realize
> that rules has changed until the election process had started and 
> refrained from expressing
> my views until the elections were over. Perhaps there are others who 
> feel the same as me
> and I urge them to speak up now, so that we could make our community 
> better.

Venka, it is possible that you haven't had sufficient time to keep up 
with all the activity on the OSGeo Discuss email list - where the voting 
process was discussed and refined.
This is understandable. It is quite a time commitment to keep up with 
email traffic, and too much traffic leads to community members dropping 
off the email list. This is something that a board needs to consider 
when engaging OSGeo Charter members. If we ask a lot of the Charter 
Members, we will find the membership drops off.
>
>>
>> -jeff
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2014-08-15 10:39 AM, Venkatesh Raghavan wrote:
>>>
>>> As I have mentioned on many occasions before, I hope that our Charter
>>> Members will be assigned more responsibilities in future decision 
>>> making
>>> on some crucial issues. Now that we have tested our new voting system,
>>> it could also be used to seek broad based consensus form our excellent
>>> Charter Membership on some some of these crucial issues.
>>>
>>> Venka
>>> _______________________________________________
>> _______________________________________________
>> Board mailing list
>> Board at lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/board
>>
>>
>
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> Board at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/board

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