[Qgis-developer] Update and extension QGIS community voting membership: New deadline Friday 20 May 2016

[Tim Sutton]

Hi all

Firstly my apologies if things are not all as clear as they should be for the community voting member nomination process - please bear in mind that we are bootstrapping the QGIS.org <http://qgis.org/> and the governance of it and we can certainly expect some teething troubles along the way. I would like to respond to some of the queries that have been raised and extend the deadline (new deadline is Friday 20 May 2016) for voting to accommodate those who still have doubts. I am going to write mainly in bullet points to keep things as clear as possible.

Eligibility to nominate:
=================

If you fall into one of these groups you can make your nominations:

* all people with commit rights to any official QGIS repository on GitHub : https://github.com/orgs/qgis/people <https://github.com/orgs/qgis/people> (note that page is paginated so check the subsequent pages if you are not on the first page)
* language maintainers and admins for any officially translated language on transifex for any of these transifex projects: QGIS Desktop, QGIS Documentation, QGIS Website - https://www.transifex.com/qgis/ <https://www.transifex.com/qgis/>
* any Redmine user with ‘manager’ status in this list  http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis/settings/members <http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis/settings/members> (if you can’t see that page, you are not in the manager list). These users are listed as redmine managers:

4everskiff 
Alessandro Pasotti
Alexander Bruy
Etienne Tourigny
Gary Sherman
Giovanni Manghi
Giuseppe Sucameli	
Jürgen Fischer
Larry Shaffer
Marco Hugentobler
Martin Dobias
Matthias Kuhn
Médéric RIBREUX
Paolo Cavallini
Radim Blazek
Raymond Nijssen
Richard Duivenvoorde
Saber Razmjooei
Tim Sutton


Nomination process:
================

* if you fall into any of the above groups you can nominate UP TO TEN persons from the broader QGIS community who you consider to be good candidates to be QGIS Community Voting members
* once all of the nominations are in, we will count the nominations and elect the community voting members based on the number of votes they have received.
* in the event of a tie breaker (e.g. the number of nominees exceeds 11 nominees with the lowest number of votes have the same amount of votes so we cannot determine the ’top eleven’), we will provide an opportunity to do another round of nominations for the contested places.
* Make your nomination using this form: http://goo.gl/forms/vkoYZkE03C <http://goo.gl/forms/vkoYZkE03C>
* PSC members may also participate in the nomination process but are not eligible for nomination
* I encourage you to be diverse in your nominations - QGIS aspires to be a welcoming community to people from all walks of life and we do not discriminate based on coders, non-coders, religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, geographic community etc. See our diversity statement: https://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/governance/codeofconduct/diversitystatement.html <https://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/governance/codeofconduct/diversitystatement.html> and code of conduct: https://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/governance/codeofconduct/codeofconduct.html <https://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/governance/codeofconduct/codeofconduct.html>
* You do not need to contact your nominee first to determine if they are willing to serve as voting member. We will verify each shortlisted nominee is available to serve  as a community voting member and remove them from the master list if they are not.
* The deadline for nominations has been extended until Midnight CET, Friday 20 May 2016

User groups:
============

* User groups may replace their voting member at any time
* User group voting members are NOT eligible to elect the community voting members unless they are also in one of the groups listed above in ‘eligibility to nominate'
* The following representatives of user groups will automatically be assumed to be the user group voting member representatives:

Contact person		QGIS User Group name
——————————————————————————————————
1 Brent Wood		NIWA QGIS USer Group
2 Anibal Alarcon		Lima Perú QGIS User Group
3 Paolo Cavallini	Gruppo degli utenti italiani di QGIS
4 Lene Fischer		QGIS Brugergruppe Danmark
5 Ross McDonald	QGIS UK - Scottish User Group
6 simon miles		England
7 João Gaspar		QGIS Portugal
8 Kevin Williams		Wales (Cymru)
9 Thomas Schüttenberg	QGIS Anwendergruppe Deutschland e.V. (QGIS-DE e.V.)
10 Andreas Neumann		QGIS User Group Switzerland
11 Milena Nowotarska	Polska Grupa Użytkowników QGIS

What happens next?
================

* After the nomination process for the QGIS Community Voting members there will be 23 voting members consisting of:
  * 11 User group voting members
  * 11 Community voting members
  * 1 OSGEO board voting member
* The voting members will elect the board
* All current PSC members will (unless they request otherwise) be candidates for election to the board
* Voting members may nominate additional candidates for the board election
* The candidates can be ANY QGIS community member (i.e. not only those identified in the eligibility to nominate section above)

* The PSC currently consists of 
   * 1 Tim Sutton (Chair), 
   * 2 Paolo Cavallini (Vice chair), 
   * 3 Otto Dassau
   * 4 Marco Hugentobler
   * 5 Anita Graser
   * 6 Andreas Neumann (treasurer)
   * 7 Richard Duivenvoorde
   * 8 Paolo Cavallini
   * 9 Jürgen Fischer
   * 10 Gary Sherman (project founder, honorary member for life)

* The voting members will elect the Board consisting of 9 elected members + Gary Sherman by electronic vote
* The Board, when elected, will elect a chairman
* We are going to move the first Annual General Meeting of the Board to Bonn later this year
* We will announce the election results at the AGM meeting in Bonn later this year
* If you would like to discuss anything about the Verein procedures, join us at the Town Hall Meeting on 26 May 2016 at the QGIS User conference - http://www.sigte.udg.edu/jornadassiglibre/en/international-qgis-user-and-developer-conference/conferencia-qgis/ <http://www.sigte.udg.edu/jornadassiglibre/en/international-qgis-user-and-developer-conference/conferencia-qgis/> (details still pending on that page)

* The voting members will be asked to approve the QGIS.org <http://qgis.org/> budget each year (by electronic vote)
* The voting members will be asked to approve the project status report from the chair each year (by electronic vote)
* The voting members will be asked to vote on board member elections
* Voting members will NOT be required to attend meetings in-person in order to vote, but will be expected to vote and stay informed about the QGIS project in order to make a meaningful vote.



This is all rather complicated...
=======================

Yes I know and I can only apologise for that! We are trying to keep things as simple as possible whilst still keeping it democratic and fair. Its not easy to balance these things and we expect to iteratively improve and refine the process over time. As an organisation there are various statutory requirements we need to adhere to and various procedural requirements that we need to follow if we are to change our 	voting system etc. I expect that we will do a revision to the above process based on your (constructive) feedback, but we need to limit these amendments to as few as possible because it is a high administrative overhead to deal with changes to the QGIS.org <http://qgis.org/> statutes.


Please feel free to contact me if you have any queries, I will try to help / address your concerns.

With thanks,





---

Tim Sutton
QGIS Project Steering Committee Chair
tim at qgis.org




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