[OSGeo Oceania] membership - elections - AGM

[Alister Hood]

Thanks John,

On Mon, 23 Sep 2019, 1:27 AM John Bryant, <johnwbryant at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey Alister, great comments and thanks for chiming in.
>
> Re: what OSGeo Oceania is likely to do... in the immediate term, continue
> running the FOSS4G SotM Oceania regional conference series. Beyond that, up
> for discussion, but there has been a lot of talk about things like running
> smaller events across the region, supporting local user groups, supporting
> & ecouraging open geospatial contributions, and helping people in Oceania
> get engaged with OSGeo & OSM activities at an international level. I'm sure
> more will come up, once we've graduated from this year of establishing the
> entity :)
>
> Re: bad actors, Andrew Harvey mentioned a situation that unfolded in OSMF
> last year:
>
>> *Recently there was a coordinated effort by one company to mass sign up
>> members to the OSMF which raised some eyebrows:
>> https://openstreetmap.lu/MWGGlobalLogicReport20181226.pdf
>> <https://openstreetmap.lu/MWGGlobalLogicReport20181226.pdf>*
>>
> Hopefully very unlikely to happen to us, but if we can protect ourselves
> from something like it, we should.
>

I was hoping someone might know of organisations where this kind of attack
was actually successful, what happened, and how it was responded to.  In
that case the "attackers" failed not because of anything OSMF did, but
because they got the date wrong.

*If the requirement to be a charter member is simply to participate on an
>> email list, does the two-tier membership really provide any protection?*
>>
> I think this is a good point, and one I agree with. I feel we should have
> some clear criteria for eligibility for voting rights for this reason. They
> don't need to be especially onerous or exclusive, but they should be
> articulated such that they can be practically implemented.
>

>
Other mechanisms? I don't know... but this would be a great time to
> identify them :)
>

I'm inclined to think that for Osgeo Oceania a single-tier membership is
suitable, but implement some of the suggestions put forward in the OSMF
document, and outline a process for dealing with suspect signups.  Perhaps
one or more membership coordinators could be empowered to deal with them,
with a right of appeal to the board, or a vote of existing members.

Also, the possibility of a corrupt board has been raised in the comments on
the document.  If this is a real concern, it may be worth discussing the
assumption that this should be run like a Westminster style democracy (i.e.
the board is elected and then does whatever it likes during its term).
Perhaps there could be procedure for a "recall" or vote of no confidence in
the board, or for members to challenge a particular action of the board.

Regards,
Alister
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/oceania/attachments/20190923/3ec088c1/attachment.html>