Re: steering committee vs foundation

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Bart Decrem <bart@eazel.com> writes:
> today's steering committee.  The Steering Committee would be elected by
> all the members of the Gnome community as a slate.  The slate would be
> proposed by the outgoing steering committee but any member could propose
> an alternative slate.  All slates that have at least 5 signatories would
> be on the election ballot.  

One nitpick: there's a potential problem with splitting up votes, for
example say you have two slates that are the same except for one
person, and another entirely different slate, and each gets 1/3 of the
vote; probably 66% of the voters would prefer one of the first two
slates, instead of the totally different slate, but their vote was split.

Debian has some formula to avoid this, which involves ranking the
choices instead of just voting for one.

Could also say that a slate needs a majority to win, and if no slate
has a majority we re-vote with only the top two slates as options.

I suppose if you just have people rank their choices, you can deduce
the outcome of the revote without having to have two votes.
 
> How does that sound?
> 

Your proposal sounds good to me, assuming it works for all the
companies that want to be involved. It also means the foundation is
very simple, which makes writing the bylaws easy and saves us a bunch
of discussion. 

So our concrete tasks are to go ahead and try to create the initial
GNOME membership list, and create an official steering committee to
replace the interim one; select the board for the foundation; and do
the paperwork for the foundation. 

Any objections to Bart's proposal, or should we start doing this?

Havoc