On 2012-01-31 23:48:21 (+0100), jdd <jdd@dodin.org> wrote:
Le 31/01/2012 23:38, Pascal Bleser a écrit :
mechanism ("non voting members", or maybe a better term) in
why is this necessary at all? can't we simply have a mark near the member name on the wiki (or elsewhere) "have voted on the last two years".
easy to have the count, then, and all this is automatic
Then you don't know how many people decided not to vote at all. Apparently, at least from the feedback of some, it is not acceptable to them to vote "none of the above", as they want to not vote at all and not even have to click an option on a webform. We're just trying to accomodate that. Question is whether we consider those who didn't vote - as "non voting members" implicitly (no time, don't care, ...), - or as "I don't like the options" That's one of the advantages of obligatory voting, you can have a fair chance at making that distinction, provided there is a "non of the above" ;) But I'm _not_ saying that I want to make voting obligatory, just discussing possible mechanisms. But, do we want and need to make that distinction ? I think it would surely be an useful metric: a board that is elected by only 60% of the active members should at least try to find out why this is happening. Right now, we have absolutely no idea whether the members who did not vote - didn't vote because they don't care - didn't vote because they're not involved with openSUSE any more - didn't vote because they didn't like any of the candidates Do we want to be able to make that distinction ? If we're talking democracy, I believe we should, at least if we care about the health of our community. <side-note> As said a few times, for a foundation though, one absolutely has to have a mechanism like that or you're not going anywhere: legal regulations for non for profit organisations oblige you to make elections and votes on a regular basis (for the board of the foundation, for approving the financial report, etc...). And you are also required to have a certain percentage of your (foundation) members to take that vote or it is seen as invalid and you have to do it again, and again, or you can't move forward nor do anything else. KDE, as an example, but only citing discussions with Cornelius from memory, has had to move to such a concept of non voting members in order to be able to get anything done on that level (hope I'm not confusing KDE e.V. with another foundation here :)). </side-note> cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf