[Qgis-tr] Call for nominations for voting members of the QGIS.org board.

[Werner Macho]

Dear QGIS Community members and Translators,

As many of you will be aware, in this last year we have been embarking
on the process to transition from a loose-knit community organisation to
a more formal organisation. This new organisation ‘QGIS.org
<http://qgis.org/>’ will be a legal entity and will afford us a greater
amount of flexibility in how we manage funds, legal agreements and so
forth. You can read the statutes for the QGIS.org
<http://qgis.org/> organisation at [0] below.

Under the statutes of the new organisation, there will be one user group
voting member put forward for each registered user group (user group
registration page is here [1]). For each user group voting member we
will have a community voting member elected. In addition there will be
one voting member from the OSGEO leadership. It is probably best
explained by way of a simple (contrived) example:

1) The Martian user group puts forward Joe Alien to be their QGIS User
Group Voting Member.
2) QGIS committers put forward nominations for a matching Community
Voting Member from within the community. Community member with the
highest number of nominations is elected. Only people with git commit
rights to an official QGIS repository or write access to the QGIS
translation platform on transifex can put forward nominations. Nominated
person can be any person from within the QGIS community who is willing
to serve as a voting QGIS community member.
3)  The Moon user group puts forward Janet Luna to be their QGIS User
Group Voting Member.
4) QGIS committers again nominate a matching Community Voting Member
5) OSGEO puts forward one person to act as the OSGEO voting member.

Voting members will elect the QGIS Board, Board Chairman and approve
budgets and the annual report. Once elected, the board will make day to
day decisions on behalf of the project as needed. The OSGEO voting
member will also serve to ensure that there are always an odd number of
voting members to avoid deadlocks. Voting members will confirm their
membership every three years.
Since we are bootstrapping the QGIS.org <http://qgis.org/> organisation,
we have not yet elected any voting members. Currently there are 10 QGIS
User Groups registered [3], thus we would like to invite all people who
have Git commit access to any official QGIS repo, or transifex write
access to make their nominations for their community voting members. The
10 consenting nominees with the highest number of nominations will be
appointed as community voting members.
We will close the nomination period on Wed 11 May if at least 10 unique
persons have been nominated, otherwise as soon as 10 unique persons have
been nominated.

We will maintain a list of the QGIS Voting Members on the web site for
public viewing.

After all of the voting members have been elected they will be asked to
elect the members of the board. Board members need not be voting
members, any QGIS community member can be elected to the board. For
formation of the new board, existing PSC members will automatically be
nominated and the community voting members can also put up additional
nominations. We would then put the election of the board members to a
vote (maintaining the same number of members as are currently in the PSC
for now). Once the board has officially been elected, the voting members
can then select a chair for the board. Note that all voting will be done
electronically via an online form.

By this process we will have a democratically elected board entrusted
with stewardship of the new QGIS.org <http://qgis.org/> Organisation.
Each year we will hold an annual general meeting and voting members can
elect a new chair, or re-elect the existing chair. Similarly on a
rotational basis, board members will be up for re-election each year. If
things are a little unclear above, I have made a simple diagram which
hopefully clarifies things (see [4] below). Note that Gary Sherman (QGIS
project founder) is board member emeritus and this will not be up for
re-election as he has life long tenure on the board.

So if you are eligible to nominate voting members (i.e. you are a
committer on any official QGIS repo or a Transifex author), please head
over to the link provided in [2] below and make your nomination!

[0]
Statutes:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FcChHYgoI4FlURrZRYBjD8kB6IBW_BaG0Ieg8TDT0pM/edit?usp=sharing
[1] User group registration: http://goo.gl/forms/6cBt8w97VC
[2] Community voting member nominations form: http://goo.gl/forms/vkoYZkE03C
[3] Registered User
Groups:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Wte5pfcpOeZ1bfBUn7KJuYzw31_rtKyGqciBPW3RXwg/edit?usp=sharing
[4] Organisation and voting process
diagram:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B__vDnQXCKiwdWMxQlN4X1BvZDg/view?usp=sharing

---

*Tim Sutton*
QGIS Project Steering Committee Chair
tim at qgis.org <mailto:tim at qgis.org>