[OSGeo-Discuss] Charter Member Selection: How to move along?

[Tamas Szekeres]

First of all, thank you for the nominees and the voting members who
participated in the current selection, congratulations for those folks who
have been selected this year, I wish you to have a good job in continuing
the mission in the opensource geospatial world.

Having this important task completed, we probably require to go ahead and
jump to the conclusion how we can leave the problems down to satisfy with
the primary objectives and mission. No manner of doubt the results of the
election is perfect, however it was quite a big deal to select only 10 from
all of those who have been nominated. I would highly support to enhance the
current approach in that way which would provide to have the set of charter
members to be consist of the most committed participants at all time. Upon
thinking about such issues, I would have the following questions to be taken
into account:

Does it make sense to limit the number of the people at all, who wish to
have this additional responsibility? In light of the statements in the OSGeo
opening page "Our goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development
of community-led projects." I would count each individual having enough
infiltration in specific areas and known by a fair amout of members (ie. by
the charter members) either in the role of a user or a developer is a great
value to be the part of this membership. Or do we have any technical
limitations in the total number of members which prevents us from growing to
be proportional to the members of the overall community? In this regard I
guess all of those who get a specific amount of vote from the charter
members should automatically be elected regardless of the total count of the
people satisfying with this criteria. I think this wouldn't take the pep out
of the members to be proud of being part of the core community.

Is this responsibility enough to keep the charter members involved in taking
part of the community work or having enough voice in defining the direction
of the movement? Currently what we expect from the voters is only to keep an
eye on the new potential charter members or board members which is great,
but I think there can be futher areas in which the charter members could
also play a role. For example we could give a help in the decision of
specific areas which may have a wide range of interest,  like selection from
the proposals of the annual conference or the winner of the Sol Katz award
or helping in such decisions which promote the direction and future of
OSGeo. We could probably establish the rules of what kind of the decisions
should be controlled this way.

Would that be reasonable to  limit the set of charter members to have only
the active participants by establishing the step-down process of the
members? I would consider for those who doesn't take part in voting for a
long time, shouldn't be considered as being active and could be removed from
the member's list within a scope of a specific process.


Let me know if you have further ideas or anything to add.


Best regards,

Tamas
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