[OSGeo-Discuss] Proposed process for selecting OSGeo charter members

[Even Rouault]

Le dimanche 29 juin 2014 22:39:42, Alex Mandel a écrit :
> In general this sounds workable for this year. Nominations will no
> longer compete against each other but only against the benchmark of what
> makes a good member.
> 
> The only reservation I have is on the 50% Yes/No, but maybe I just need
> a clarification.
> I see plenty of people potentially voting Yes/No/Abstain(just not
> marking a particular candidate). So is 50% of the number of people who
> picked Yes vs No or is 50% the total number of charter members or is 50%
> the number of charter members who voted in the election? How this line
> is calculated varies the number of required votes. FYI, only voting Yes
> and skipping No give people about the same style of vote as the previous
> method.

Indeed this must be clarified.

The voting system I'm familiar with doesn't count absention vote (it is like 
the voter was not in the set of allowed voters). So e.g. let's imagine we have 
100 charter members that can vote. For nominee X, 45 vote yes, 20 vote no and 
35 don't vote. The ratio of yes over the expressed votes would be 45 / (45 + 
20) > 50 %.
But I can also understand that we would want at least half of the potential 
voters to have voted yes (so here 50)

A question is : does the voting system that had been identified can handle 
multiple referendum questions ?

> 
> To me more than a few no votes for a person seems somewhat
> controversial. At the same time we don't want to give veto power to
> small groups of people. If a vote is close 50/49, do we really want to
> allow someone in the 49 charter members clearly have a reason for
> rejecting? I don't really have a suggestion at this time for what the
> right way to solve this is.

Most OSGeo process and projects are run by concensus. So a decision where half 
people disagree doesn't sound like a concensus, and I wouldn't be shoked that 
the nominee doesn't qualify then.

However in practice I wouldn't expect a lot of no votes. I can see 3 cases :
- you know the nominee and approve the nomination --> yes vote
- you don't know him/her, but trust the person who has nominated him/her --> 
yes vote (or abstention)
- you know the nominee and have strong reasons to reject his/her nomination --
> no vote

So I anticipate that in practice all proposed nominees would be accepted, 
which is not necessarily a bad thing if we want to be more inclusive.

Even

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