The GNOME Foundation Membership and Elections Committee are pleased to announce the upcoming elections for the Board of Directors in Spring 2020.
The most important deadlines (UTC) in the timeline are the following:
*GNOME Board Elections 2020*
2020-05-18: List of candidates opens.
2020-05-29: Last day to announce candidacies, submit summary statements.
2020-05-30: Final list of candidates.
2020-06-01: Instructions mailed to eligible voters, voting begins.
2020-06-14: Voting closes.
2020-06-15: Preliminary results are announced.
2020-06-22: Last day to challenge preliminary results.
ELECTIONS
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Four of the seven members of our current Board of Directors have been ruling GNOME for 12 months now. We, the GNOME Foundation Members, will have to elect what will be the Board of Directors for the next year.
Why elections are going to renew four out of seven seats this year? Please read below under the VOTING session.
CANDIDACY
=========
If you want to run for one of the seven positions on The GNOME
Foundation Board of Directors, then send an email to
Candidacies must be announced prior to 2020-05-29, 23:59 UTC.
All discussion related to the elections should be held on
foundation-list. Members are invited to ask questions to one or all
candidates on that list (see below).
A list of candidates will be announced on 2020-05-30.
At this point, you are invited to ask the candidates questions via Discourse at:
These candidates might become your representative, so do not hesitate to ask them questions.
Please try to avoid asking duplicate questions that others have
already asked. Also, bear in mind that the candidates invest a lot of
time answering questions, so please be reasonable with the amount and scope of the questions.
ELECTORATE
==========
Every GNOME Foundation member whose membership is valid as of
2020-05-30 is eligible to vote in the elections. Please note that
Emeritus members won't have voting rights. More details about what
Emeritus members can and can't do are available at
If you are not a member yet, please consider applying for membership
as soon as possible at
Late applications will most likely not be processed in time.
The GNOME Foundation Membership and Elections Committee do inform members they need to renew by mailing them once a month both on their personal e-mail and on the foundation-list mailing list. We recommend that members to also double check this to avoid a missed opportunity to vote. Please verify that the email address that is associated with your GNOME Foundation membership is valid and that you are able to read emails sent to this address. With the introduction of
https://account.gnome.org verifying this information is now possible by just logging in with your GNOME Account. Your password can be reset with the following command:
A new password will be e-mailed directly to the registered e-mail for
your account. In case the above solution won't work or you don't know
what your username is please get in touch with the GNOME Accounts Team at
accounts gnome org.
You can verify your membership status by visiting
https://foundation.gnome.org/membership/members.php and looking for your name, surname on the list of members. You can also verify your last renewal date by highlighting your name, surname with your mouse and waiting a little second for the date to appear correctly.
VOTING
======
The Electorate will receive complete instructions on how to vote by
2020-06-01 via email.
This specific election run is the first one occurring after the following
amendments were introduced to the Foundation's Bylaws. The aforementioned changes introduced the ability to only renew a subset of the available seats of the Board. The rationale of the changes and the historical information about these specific amendments can be found here:
The candidates voted for most as counted by a single transferable vote system will be elected, except that no more than two individuals affiliated with any one corporation may be sitting on the Board as Directors during the same term. This holds true even in the case a subset of seats is up for renewal: as an example if X is affiliated with the Example Inc. and his/her seat is not up for renewal, the amount of possible candidates affiliated with Example Inc. that may be elected would be 1 (one). On top of that and as taken from the Foundation's Bylaws: "8.2.4: In the event that any election of directors results in a single entity representing greater than 40% of the Board, than the nominee representing that entity receiving the least number of votes, shall be replaced by the nominee receiving the greatest number of votes who was not elected to the Board." For a full definition of corporate affiliation, see the GNOME Foundation charter at:
In the event of a tie for the final slot on the board, the Elections
Committee will schedule run-off elections as soon as possible.
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More information about The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee and the voting process can be found here:
--
Cheers,
Andrea
Red Hatter,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator,
Former GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Secretary,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman
