Re: Petition for referendum

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 9/29/05, Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com> wrote:
> [1] - Yes, its not entirely accurate. Some people on the hypothetical
> board-of-seven may not have run for election at all if the board size
> was smaller.

You know that's inaccurate, Mark. Everyone who has good friends on the
board knows that every year at least a couple board members are
elected who put their names in nomination mainly because the first
10+X candidates contain at least X people who are, well, not good for
some reason or another[1], and they fear that if they don't
self-nominate, one or more not good people will get elected.

This isn't to say these candidates/board members have been bad people-
they feel a deep responsibility to GNOME, which is why they sacrifice
and run for the board when they'd rather not, and usually, because
they feel a deep responsibility, they are conscientious board members.
But if we had a smaller board size, every person on the board would
actually *want* to be on the board, and we'd actually have to think
hard about who we want to vote for, instead of who we don't want to
vote for. I think that would be a huge improvement on many levels.

Luis

[1] They might be percieved to be incredibly disruptive and impossible
to work with on issues of strategy, for example, or might be percieved
as being very immature.