[OSGeo-Discuss] Board candidates: what are your plans?

[Johan Van de Wauw]

Hello everyone,

I'm relatively new to OSGeo (at least the organisational part), but
I'm a bit surprised by the board elections.
I'm seeing two phases: a nomination phase and a voting phase. I double
checked and last year it was the same. In my opinion we are missing
the most important step: a "campaigning period". I'd like to know what
each candidate would like to do, how they see the future of OSGeo,...

Now - don't get me wrong- we have (up to now) 7 excellent candidates
for 5 positions, and probably many other charter members have done so
much for the community that they deserve to be on the board. But as
much as I would like to thank all of them, I would like to use
different criteria for selecting board members.What are your vision
and goals? Where should OSGeo head to? What about the financial
situation? I'd like to know each candidate's vision before voting.

Actually, all other volunteer run organisations where I've been
involved have such a phase. Usually it happens "offline" during
general assemblies, but at least for debian they are online [1]. The
actual examples from debian are for choosing the project leader and
are way too long, but I'd definitively like to read a paragraph or two
which vision each candidate has on OSGeo.

So here is my proposal:
For next year:
- Make something like a "campaining period" a part of the election.
Give candidates an official time to explain their plans and have room
for discussion afterwards. I actually think this would be a better
place for "endorsements" than the nomination phase. Endorsing a
candidate for his/her future plans based on his/her current
achievement is imho a stronger signal than some of the endorsements we
saw on the list before.


For this year:
- Even if there is no official period, I'd still love to see the
vision/answers to the above questions from the candidates.

Johan

[1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2013/platforms/