[Board] motions from June 18 meeting - making OSGeo Charter membership more exclusive

[Jeff McKenna]

Hi Daniel,

I'm very glad to see people speaking up now.

We do have time, in fact if we needed to we can spend another month on 
this (last year's voting didn't start until 19 July).  I began this 
process earlier this year, on 25 May, because yes I saw this debate 
coming, I wanted to give time for change to occur.  So, I am against 
deferring any change until next year (as you know, that is never a 
successful way to make change).  I'm happy to use the extra time to 
decide on the 2015 process if we need to.


-jeff



On 2015-06-22 2:48 PM, Daniel Morissette wrote:
> There is definitely room for improvement to make sure the foundation is
> protected from a hostile take over which is becoming very unlikely given
> today's number of charter members anyway. But if we are still worried,
> then giving more importance to the NO votes in the calculation of the
> threshold is likely part of the solution. I just don't know what it the
> perfect solution would be.
>
>
> Unfortunately, after looking at last year's numbers again I don't think
> that the proposed change to move to 50% YES votes is much better than
> the current situation unless we better educate our voters since based on
> last year's results it would just draw an arbitrary line in the middle
> of the list. Last year all candidates got 39% or more... that 39% is
> very close to 50%, and 29 of the 64 candidates were in the 45% to 55%
> range and most of them being people mostly active and visible at the
> local level in their own country or community. Many of them would have
> been turned down just because they are not popular enough outside of
> their home country to get an extra 5% votes to meet the arbitrary 50%
> line, that doesn't feel very inclusive to me.
>
>
> Short of having a better short term solution in the next week or so, my
> vote as charter member would be to keep the rules unchanged for this
> year and proceed with the 2015 election. ... and as we say every year...
> those who care enough to change the process (and I'm not one of them),
> should start working on new rules early in the fall to avoid repeating
> this process discussion again next sprint.
>
> Daniel
>
>
>
> On 2015-06-22 1:19 PM, Bart van den Eijnden wrote:
>> Or someone else suggested:
>>
>> (YES-NO) / (YES+NO+ABSTAIN)
>>
>> But something doesn’t seem right the way we measure it now.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Bart
>>
>>> On 22 Jun 2015, at 19:10, Bart van den Eijnden <bartvde at osgis.nl> wrote:
>>>
>>> Actually the way we measure now (% support) there is no difference
>>> between a NO and an ABSTAIN? Should we not leave out ABSTAIN from the
>>> total population?
>>>
>>> So:
>>>
>>> YES / (NO + YES)  = percentage support?
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Bart
>>>
>>>> On 22 Jun 2015, at 19:06, Peter Baumann
>>>> <p.baumann at jacobs-university.de> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> just to speak it out: of course NOs are one way of upvoting a
>>>> favourite candidate.
>>>> -Peter
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 06/22/15 19:02, Jorge Sanz wrote:
>>>>> 2015-06-22 18:09 GMT+02:00 Daniel Morissette
>>>>> <dmorissette at mapgears.com>:
>>>>>> Margherita makes a very good point here, that if someone gets
>>>>>> multiple NO
>>>>>> votes then they are probably not a good candidate. That's what I
>>>>>> would have
>>>>>> thought as well.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> However, after last year's election I was extremely surprised to
>>>>>> see that
>>>>>> even the top-5 candidates which all got over 70% support also got
>>>>>> 2-3 NO
>>>>>> votes each:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Election_2014_detailed_results
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I don't understand why someone would vote NO for those 5 people as
>>>>>> charter
>>>>>> members given track record. I can only imagine that not everybody
>>>>>> interprets
>>>>>> the "NO" vote to mean the same thing...
>>>>>>
>>>>> I'm pretty sure of that Daniel, and we only can try to improve that
>>>>> being well explicit on the instructions but still many people don't
>>>>> read the explanations.
>>>>>
>>>>> I remember watching someone votes (no name, just his/her votes) and I
>>>>> was surprised of seeing a lot of NOes and thinking "he has not
>>>>> understood what we wanted to mean by a YES/NO/Abstain".
>>>>>
>>>>> We'll try this year to improve the instructions on the voting,
>>>>> definitely.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Dr. Peter Baumann
>>>> - Professor of Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen
>>>>   www.faculty.jacobs-university.de/pbaumann
>>>>   mail: p.baumann at jacobs-university.de
>>>>   tel: +49-421-200-3178, fax: +49-421-200-493178
>>>> - Executive Director, rasdaman GmbH Bremen (HRB 26793)
>>>>   www.rasdaman.com, mail: baumann at rasdaman.com
>>>>   tel: 0800-rasdaman, fax: 0800-rasdafax, mobile: +49-173-5837882
>>>> "Si forte in alienas manus oberraverit hec peregrina epistola
>>>> incertis ventis dimissa, sed Deo commendata, precamur ut ei reddatur
>>>> cui soli destinata, nec preripiat quisquam non sibi parata." (mail
>>>> disclaimer, AD 1083)
>>>>