[OSGeo Oceania] membership - elections - AGM

[Bruce Bannerman]

Hi John and fellow OO Community Members,

I’ve now gone through the proposed document and comments either in the document or on this list.

Some observations:

We need to remember that we are part of the global OSGeo Community and operate within that community and framework. In my opinion the International OSGeo is where much of the community’s work occurs. OSGeo Oceania provides the regional focus and allows us to coordinate regionally and to communicate global developments and efforts.

Therefore it is not appropriate that we set up a separate framework to replace OSGeo (not that I see that anyone has suggested this).

I see that the main reason for the perceived need for two tiers of membership within OSGeo Oceania (OO) is to ensure that: 
We have people as directors of the legal entity who hold positive attributes that we admire. These attributes include:
acting for the greater good of OSGeo Oceania and OSGeo;
active and positive contributions to community activities; and 
are of good and ethical repute.

There is also a secondary requirement as highlighted by Alister: to remove Directors who won’t resign voluntarily from the OO legal entity at the end of their term, or who are not acting in the best interests of either OSGeo Oceania or OSGeo.

As noted by several people, the overheads of managing an additional membership process for OSGeo Oceania (in addition to that required for OSGeo) is likely to be onerous. However, we still need a two tier membership process to protect the best interests of the OSGeo and OSGeo communities and the OO Legal entity.

Therefore in the interest of keeping things simple, I propose the following variant to what has been discussed:
Keep a two tier membership process as outlined in the document.
The main membership categary comprises those who self nominate to be members of the OO Community, by signing up to one of the OSGeo Oceania mailing lists and participate in discussion and activities.
The second Charter Member category automatically comprises OSGeo Charter Members [1] who are also members of the OO Community.

This approach:
negates the need for having OO to manage a separate membership process
makes clear the relationship between OSGeo and OSGeo Oceania.
Uses existing and proven OSGeo contributers of good repute by way of OSGeo Charter Members. 
Allows for new OSGeo Charter Members to be proposed from the OSGeo Oceania community within the tried and tested OSGeo Charter Member process.

There will still be the need to:
Define our membership levels and processes
Define and hold an election process (every two years?) to refresh our pool of board members / legal entity directors.
(probably) revise the OO Legal Enity’s Articles of Association to allow for a process for OSGeo Charter Members (within the to be defined Oceania region) to remove non-performing directors etc of the legal entity etc.

I hope this helps.

Kind regards,

Bruce

[1] https://www.osgeo.org/about/charter-members/ <https://www.osgeo.org/about/charter-members/> 




> On 23 Sep 2019, at 18:29, John Bryant <johnwbryant at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks all for a quite robust discussion on this important topic, it's really great to see this much engagement. There seems to be a fair bit of discomfort with the two tier model proposed, and I agree that it may introduce more complexity than we really want. To move forward, I'd like to propose a simplified alternative:
> We have a single type of membership that confers voting rights.
> To ensure a reasonable level of engagement, while protecting the org against bad actors/hostile takeover/etc, we roughly follow this process:
> take nominations for new members
> use an eligibility threshold that balances accessibility with genuine engagement
> include a ratification step that could be done by the board, or a membership working group (TBD)
> This doesn't capture all the detail of how this would work, but if it's acceptable in broad strokes, I can update our draft policy and we can work through the details over next couple of days.
> 
> Any objections?
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Oceania mailing list
> Oceania at lists.osgeo.org
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/oceania

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