On 9/12/07, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Nod. However, Erik expressed the desire to expand the board earlier (december I presume or later ?). If so, it would be by appointment probably.
I actually do share your concerns regarding an early expansion, especially since Michael is likely to be replaced soon.
Another concern is the difficulty of consensus-building and even basic procedures (getting enough people to vote) in an expanded Board. I'll note that the Board resolved in January 2006 to create an "Executive Committee", a mechanism which is used by some non-profits to delegate Board responsibility to a subset of the Board between meetings.
This might be a feasible structure for us also, as we are fairly active (and likely to remain so, if in different areas) between meetings, but currently can only take decisions as a group. In the past, Brad had advised us to postpone serious discussion of such an entity until the Board is expanded again. So it's in this context in which I'll bring up the notion again.
Now, with regard to appointed or elected members:
My position has been consistently (since the Bylaws revision) that having the majority of Board members elected from the community is desirable. Having the _entire_ Board elected from the community would probably leave us with insufficient flexibility to appoint people with specific needed skills.
I might, in some situations, favor using the appointment mechanism to bring in a member of the community we have a strong trust relationship with, but who is not prominent enough to be elected; in such situations, the seat could be converted to an elected one later.
I would also favor "converting" Jimmy's seat to an elected one; he has expressed in the past that he would be fine with such a conversion. Jimmy is not just a member of the community, he is its very founder, so it seems a bit odd to rely on the mechanism of appointment for keeping him on the Board. I do not think he would have any trouble with getting re-elected. :-)
This would give us some more flexibility under the "majority elected" principle, as we currently only have 2 members (Michael and Jan-Bart) on a 7 member Board who are from outside the community. If the conversion of Jimmy's seat coincided with a Board expansion, we could add 2 appointed members, while not actually adding any community members. That's a possible scenario I might support.