[Board] Added "OSGeo Charter Responsibilities"

[Eli Adam]

Running a little behind in this thread...


On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 4:53 PM, Venkatesh Raghavan <
raghavan at media.osaka-cu.ac.jp> 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?
>

I thought that Cameron got fairly broad consensus (or provided opportunity
for that to happen) through the discuss list starting here,
http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2014-June/012946.html

And then worked through the wiki,
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php?title=Membership_Process_2014&oldid=78363



>
> 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?
>

The point of the new election process was that the previous process was
seen as flawed since it denied people who some thought should have been
admitted.  Do you think that the previous process was flawed and needed
revision?  How would you revise it?  Perhaps the Board can direct Jorge to
provide some aggregate anonymous results (i.e. what was the average 'yes'
vote for all nominees, 'no' vote average, 'abstain' vote average).  This
could also help revise the process.  It is possible that the average
election rate was 50%+ 'yes' which seems good and would suggest that this
5% number could be raised.

I think that most non-profit volunteer organizations allow membership by
simply signing up or paying $5-50/year.


>
> 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.
>

If Jorge thinks that it is feasible to run frequent electronic votes, I
think that is great.  I also think that informal opinion polls are better
than binding votes.  I also like the open discussion on the OSGeo email
lists.  I get more benefit from open discussion than private polling.  Open
discussion gives me new ideas and perspectives and things I had not thought
of before, it also gives me the opportunity to learn more and change my
mind.  Private polling just exercises the limited thoughts I already have.
I like doing both but don't think that private polling can replace open
discussion.  I don't see why Cameron or others would wade into such an
unpleasant task as 'determine community consensus on this contentious
issue' if they had the alternative of 'run a private poll by pushing a few
buttons (or asking Jorge to do a bunch of work)'.  I don't see any reason
to limit opinion polls to Charter Members.  Why not run community polls?


> 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.
>

So then it worked.  Let's improve it and ensure that it works even better
in the future.

Thanks for this open discussion.  It is useful to me and I hope others
too.

Best regards, Eli



> 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.


Often times it does seem that we as OSGeo do things on a compressed last
minute timeline.  I don't think that is ideal but people don't make efforts
to do it sooner and generally people don't engage when people do make
earlier attempts.


>
>
>
>> -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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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