On 5/18/20 8:37 PM, Richard Brown wrote:
On Sat, 2020-05-16 at 14:34 -0700, Fraser_Bell wrote:
On 5/16/20 2:46 AM, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
On Fri 2020-05-15, Fraser_Bell wrote:
I very much hope this is a misunderstanding or unclear wording on your end, not an official statement by the election officials.
Sorry, yes, my confusion as well as the most recent member of the officials. Ish has clarified it in his response.
Although, I must say, the thought that a minority can cause a full re-election of the elected Board Officials deeply distresses me.
In that case, if that happens, I personally will be considering giving up my openSUSE Membership and leaving openSUSE.
Not that anyone will really miss me, anyway, but I believe in Democratic Rule by the Majority and I will Stand or Fall on that, so this is a matter of Principle with me.
I think the point you are neglecting to consider is that the 20% rule is not "The membership should be proactively asked to see whether 20% of them disagree with the democractically elected Board and to trigger a reelection"
But the 20% rule is more "if 20% of the membership is driven enough to, themselves, proactively push for re-electing the whole Board, then that re-election is triggered"
Given we're a project where 1 person can contribute and change a lot technically, if the Board is ruling in a way to, speaking frankly, piss off 20% of the membership enough to drive them to campaign against the Board, then maybe re-electing the Board is the best option for community harmony.
That said, I think the rule was never written with the idea of the election committee getting involved. I certainly always envisioned that such cases requiring far more proactive engagement from the disgruntled 20% than just 1 person calling for a vote of no confidence..a call that wasn't even seconded on the mailinglist..
When looking at this the problem we have is with things like mail spoofing etc The only way we can actually be sure that the opinion's we are getting are actually from members is with Helios and its then obvious that its best that the board isn't handling that process.
However, I think the election committees compromise of a petition does a good job of keeping with the spirit of the rule and requiring people to step up if they are unhappy even if it undoubtly does lower the bar for a re-election than I would have expected by proactively engaging with the not-seconded call.
Yeah with the perspective of an upcoming foundation I think whatever we come up with needs to have only one clear interpretation so we don't end up spending hours arguing on mailing lists or worse end up with lawyers involved. The above is the best I could come up with that balances the original intent with clear process and not allowing 1-2 members to grind parts of the project to a halt for a month or two. I'd like to hear better suggestions though. Even with issues around email addresses etc I think documenting that 20% of membership must +1 an email to openSUSE project would probably be workable. It would be hard to spoof a significant number of votes without someone with a spoofed email address noticing. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B