Hi Gerry, On 5/17/20 7:04 AM, 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.
It would be really sad to see you leave the project. As probably the only other person who has read the election rules as much as Gerald and Richard in the last few years, while I agree with there interpretation I think looking toward the foundation we can certainly improve on them and I'd like you to be a part of that. But i'd prefer to do that after the current process is finished largely because the process is to remove me. I think the general idea from the people who original rules was to have a way for members to remove the board if they believe the board as a whole has acted inappropriately. I believe that such an concept is very worth having but our implementation could be improved. Given that unlike debian we don't have a gpg keyring so the only way we can trust members completely is with a voting system this makes the general idea of getting a partition of members much harder to do practically. It also means that one or two members can choose to cause serious disruption to the project by seeking the removal of the board. So I would probably change this rule to require 10 members to contact the election officials seeking a petition to remove the board. Once the election officials are reasonably satisfied that they have verified this is the 10 members wish they could then start the whole of project process. As for the 20% or 50% I still lean toward the 20%, I trust that the majority of our community would only vote for such a measure in extreme circumstances. Given that no project ever gets 100% voter turnout I understand the less then 50% as in drastic circumstances you still want it to be possible. We cleaned up the membership several years ago so our voter turnout is reasonable, but I could see over time it falling to 40% of members and then 20% of total would be about half of them.
From at least my interpretation of the election rules, if the 20% vote is successful, none of the current members can restand for election for a year. Another potential solution could be to remove this for the 20% clause, then if 50% of the members disagreed with the partition they could vote the whole board or a part of the board back in. Or we could just have a second 50% vote after the petition. I don't have as strong an opinion on these things as say the initial 10 people, but i'll certainly suggest we change the rules somehow in the future regardless of what happens this time.
Cheers -- 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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org