[GRASS-PSC] GRASS PSC elections in 2016

[Helena Mitasova]

> On May 14, 2016, at 11:34 AM, Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear PSC,
> 
> time has passed since the last elections in 2012. As the chair of the
> PSC I suggest that we renew part of the current PSC (see:
> https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/PSC#Members).
> I suggest the following tentative schedule:
> 
> - May 2016: preannounce elections (see this email) and
>  - identify members who do not stand for election
>  - identify inactive members (here the Geoserver PSC has some useful rules [1]

I find the Geoserver rules rather drastic - they are really important for governance model where 
PSC makes a lot of decisions about development which is not the case for GRASS
I assume that our inactive members won’t be interested in standing for election and
that way their membership will end.
As suggested, we should have 3 year term membership so everybody will have to be
re-elected at least once in 3 years.
I like the way how the board of directors is elected - it ensures both the continuity and rotation of members.

>  - assign free'd up slots to election
> 
> - May 2016: officially announce PSC elections
> 
> - 16 June 2016, 12:00 UTC: nominations possible by community
> 
> - June 2016: elections (here it would be great use the technology of
> the OSGeo charter member elections)

there will be new technology used this year - Vasile knows more about it.

>  Here we have the problem to not have a charter membership.

we can have a system where anybody can nominate a candidate and the contributors with 
svn access (both core and add-ons) vote - can you find out how many we have ?
This is just my suggestion to keep things simple - we can put this out for dicussion on the 
GRASS dev and users list.
> 
> - July 2016: PSC communicates the new members.
> 
> 
> IMPORTANT:
> We need to solve the following issues:
> - how to remove members from the PSC? (see [1] for inspiration)

see my comment above - I don’t think the Geoserver model is good for us
(I don’t like kicking people out of anything), I think members should go through re-election every 3 years
if we start with this elections, third of the current member slots should open up
and the current members affected should stand or not stand for re-election.
We can randomly  pick up the slots to be freed to start the cycle.

> - how to elect new members?

if we have enough developers with svn access (core and add-on) they could represent “charter members”
because they are considered trusted members of the community.
But it would be good to find a way how to include power users who do not have svn access.
In the document [2], I think the nomination should go also to GRASS dev list (in addition to PSC and users list).

These are just my thoughts, others may have better ideas,

Helena


> 
> Best,
> Markus
> 
> [1] http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/developer/policies/psc.html#stepping-down
> [2] https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/PSC/Election2016 (draft)
> 
> --
> GRASS GIS PSC chair
> https://grass.osgeo.org
> _______________________________________________
> grass-psc mailing list
> grass-psc at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-psc

Helena Mitasova
Professor at the Department of Marine, 
Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences
and Center for Geospatial Analytics
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-8208
hmitaso at ncsu.edu
http://geospatial.ncsu.edu/osgeorel/publications.html

"All electronic mail messages in connection with State business which are sent to or received by this account are subject to the NC Public Records Law and may be disclosed to third parties.”