Re: election plans

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Hi everyone,

I like the idea of fast tracking this so that we'd have an actual board
by August 1.   A couple of things that need to get done if we want to
have elections quickly:

1- Posting a list of all the members of the Gnome community ASAP so
people can ask to be added to that list.  I think the Steering Committee
has already OK'd this idea, and I think we had two volunteers to take
the lead on this.  So let's post the first draft of that list and get
other folks to add themselves.

2- Slates.  We need to tell the Gnome community that people can present
slates and give them basic rules.   Slates need to have 7 - 15 members,
no majority from any one company, need to have 10 endorsements (with no
more than 5 from any one company).  A slate should also include a few
paragraphs about why this is a good slate, what it tries to achieve
etc.  There's 2 obvious sources for semi-authoritative slates:
-1: the Gnome Steering Committee: are you guys preparing a slate?
-2: the foundation-list: Martin suggested preparing a slate.  Are we
working towards that?

3- Election apparatus.  I suspect we're not going to have more than 2 or
3 slates, so the easy way to hold the elections would be to just create
an email address where all members can send email to.  The subject of
their message would be the name of the slate they support.  That makes
it really easy to tally results, to ensure than nobody votes more than
once (you just use a mailman list), but the elections would not be
secret (which I don't think is a big deal).  If we want more
sophisticated election apparatus, it might get hard to pull off in time.

4- Election timeline.  To pull this off we'd need something like this:
(1) agree on the above proposal (or some variation thereof) by July 26
(Wednesday)
(2) send email to Gnome mailing lists on July 27, inviting people to add
themselves to the membership list and to submit slates
(3) August 4.  Deadline for submitting slates
(4) August 9-12.  Elections
(5) August 13.  Winning slate announced.  That slate will be the
founding board of directors of the Gnome foundation.


So let's decide if we think it's a sane idea to do the elections along
this timeline.  The alternative is to have elections sometime after LWE
and just announce the creation of the foundation at LWE.  Your thoughts?

Bart


Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Nat Friedman <nat@helixcode.com> writes:
> > From the discussions before on this list, it seems to me that there
> > was a lot of support for electing a slate from the beginning.
> >
>
> OK. So we need a timeline for this yesterday.
>
> I propose that nominations for slates must be in by August 2, and the
> vote is on August 9. (These are totally random dates, but hey we have
> to pick some.)
>
> We should announce the dates today or tomorrow.
>
> Havoc
>
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