[opensuse-project] Volunteers for openSUSE board election committee wanted
The board has approved the openSUSE board election proposal as written up on this list http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2008-03/msg00252.html with the change that for now the board will do the membership approval, the details are now in the wiki at http://en.opensuse.org/Board/Election. We discussed the membership approval and consider that right now a task for the board - and not a burden - and also do not want to give the election committee too much work. We're now asking for volunteers for the openSUSE election team to drive the election process. The members of the election team have the following duty: * Drive the openSUSE board elections - this means the complete process starting by collecting volunteers, deciding on how to do the voting, driving the setup of any tools for the voting, announcing the election and results. Note: Members of the election team will not be able to stand up for the openSUSE board election themselves. If you're interested, please mail the openSUSE board at board@opensuse.org, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform / openSUSE, aj@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126
On Montag, 26. Mai 2008, Andreas Jaeger wrote: Hi,
We discussed the membership approval and consider that right now a task for the board - and not a burden - and also do not want to give the election committee too much work. reading this and a paragraph from the mailing list archive which is | * openSUSE members will be choosen by the openSUSE election team. The | openSUSE board may be contacted when anybody considers the decision | was wrong, and the board may overrule the membership decision. tells me that the existing board has (more than) influence on the group of people who may elect at all. In a democratic system that would not be acceptable I think.
For us that might be no problem in good times, but things might change and these kind of rules should be good from fist day on. Or do these two rules only apply for the first election? Just for the records, Klaas -- Klaas Freitag Architect OPS/IPD SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - Nuernberg --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org
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Klaas Freitag wrote:
| On Montag, 26. Mai 2008, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
|> We discussed the membership approval and consider that right now a task
|> for the board - and not a burden - and also do not want to give the
|> election committee too much work.
|
| reading this and a paragraph from the mailing list archive which is
| | * openSUSE members will be choosen by the openSUSE election team. The
| | openSUSE board may be contacted when anybody considers the decision
| | was wrong, and the board may overrule the membership decision.
| tells me that the existing board has (more than) influence on the
| group of people who may elect at all. In a democratic system that
| would not be acceptable I think.
Yes. But it's really a chicken/egg situation atm. The main mission of
the current "bootstrap" board is to organize elections.
The election committee has no legitimacy at all, it's composed of people
who are willing to invest time into it, and if there are lots of
volunteers (none up to now), the board will pick.
If someone has a better suggestion that won't take us insane efforts or
a vast amount of years to implement, I'd love to hear about it :)
It's clearly a compromise. And until we have a first democratically
elected board (with the few caveats we know about: still a potentially
strong control from the board, unelected election committee without
legitimacy, ...), things will be different, because we will have an
elected kernel.
As far as I am concerned, I think that an election committee is even
worse in terms of democracy than having the board organize the elections
(because of a simple reason: why would you trust the election committee
members ? who will have put their vote of trust in them ? and no, we're
not going to organize elections to determine an election committee :)).
But the obvious catch is that the elections cannot be organized by
people who are running for being elected.
| For us that might be no problem in good times, but things might
| change and these kind of rules should be good from fist day on.
| Or do these two rules only apply for the first election?
Well at least they apply for these elections. I'm not sure whether it's
still the best way to handle the next ones.
For a perfect solution, we'd need an independent group of people who'd
run the elections, who have 100% trust of everyone in the community.
I don't think such a group will ever exist :) If at all, then that would
be the elected board.
| Just for the records,
Yep. I think we're all very aware of the limitations and potential
issues, but we don't want to get into a overly complex and
time-consuming process either (at least, I certainly don't want to) --
if we could find one that would be 100% bullet-proof at all, which I
seriously doubt at this point.
cheers
- --
~ -o) Pascal Bleser
participants (3)
-
Andreas Jaeger -
Klaas Freitag -
Pascal Bleser