Board voting ends today, but...

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 06:01:38PM +0100, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 08:26:30AM -0800, Carl Worth wrote:
> > Please, whenever you want more information from the board, please just
> > ask. I can give you my personal assurance that there's no desire on the
> > part of the board to willfully withhold information about its doings
> > From the membership.
> 
> I believe some things have been asked for already:
> * minutes or logs.

Bart is collating his logs, and those will be posted very soon.

> * details of financial dealings.

This is being worked on as well, TTBOMK.

> Only a very limited amount of both has been made available.
> 
> I am not sure whether 25% really is a sufficiently high percentage to 
> ever be able to claim that an election becomes invalid. Especially since 
> some people have already claimed that they do not wish to be a member if 
> transparency is this low.

Well, the bylaws (which were voted on by the membership back in 2006 or
thereabouts -- I believe you were a member at the time this was voted on
and approved) state 25%.  If anyone's got any suggestions for improving
the bylaws, then I'm sure they'd be welcome, and the membership can vote
on changing the bylaws again.

Cancelling the election would in my view be phenomenally inappropriate:
if that happened and someone suggested that the board canned the
election because it didn't like the field, the timing, the way it was
going, etc, then I would not have any good response to them.

We've all (well, mostly) voted on a board that we're presumably happy
with by now.  If the membership is deeply unhappy after the election,
then we can vote for a recall/secondary election.  But cancelling the
election and continuing indefinitely with the current board is something
that would make me deeply uncomfortable, and more than anything I think
smacks of wild impropriety.

You've stated that some people are distressed enough to cancel their
membership -- so far I'm unaware of anyone who's done so.  If the
general opinion is that the organisation has been so compromised by
non-disclosure that this election was not enough, then surely this will
be borne out by a vote of the members.  As it is, only 54 members out of
144 currently active voted in the election (up from 42 last year), and
the members list is almost entirely silent except around election time.
It'd certainly be nice if this newfound interest in the Foundation's
health would be sustained beyond the election.

Cheers,
Daniel
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