On 7/14/07, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/14/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
There are currently seven seats.
Three are held by appointed members (Jimbo, Michael, Jan-Bart) and their terms expire on 31 December this year. From that time onwards, appointed members are appointed for terms of one year.
Three are held by elected members (Erik, Kat, Frieda) who were just elected yesterday, their terms last for two years, and will expire on 30 June 2009.
The odd one out is Ant, who was an elected member whose term was due to end 30 June this year, but she was converted to an appointed member at the last board expansion with a term expiring on 30 June 2008. At that time, Ant's appointed seat will be replaced by an elected seat.
I anticipate (based on the most recent Board expansion resolution) that the Board will expand to nine members at that time, adding another two community elected seats, with terms commencing 1 July 2008. This will result in two tranches of three elected members serving two year terms, beginning on 1 July, offset from each other by one year, and one tranche of appointed members with one year terms beginning on 1 January each year.
Fixing inadvertent top posting...
Hoi, I have supported and do support that employees and ex-employees should not be eligible to stand for an elected function of the Wikimedia Foundation. Ex-employees would become eligible again after a year.
This original point was made in an e-mail on the Foundation list by Jan-Bart.
Thanks, GerardM
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-April/029433.html
A year long cooling period, perhaps even one year and a half for good measure, sounds at first hearing like a capital idea.
However, this does open theoretical avenues for abuse... strictly theoretical mind you...
To take a perfectly hypothetical case. Let us say the foundation board members are worried that notorious troublemaker Tweedledee is going to run for board of trustees membership. And despite his tendency to rouffle feathers, or perhaps because of it, they fear Tweedledee might easily do well in the elections, maybe even get in.
So the trustees have a bright idea! They hire Tweedledee, as an employee in charge of paperclips and hand him a red stapler giving him a desk at the basement of the foundation office.
Now, there is a rule that there is an X month quarantine during which former employees may not run for elected office.
So, X minus one months before the election, they fire Tweedledee, ensuring that Tweedledee may only run after X minus one months plus the term between elections.
I grant this is purely hypothetical. But to be quite serious, so is it quite hypothetical to presume that a former employee running for a board of trustees position would be deleterious to the boards functioning. In fact one might equally argue that having been in contact with the board intimately, they might even have a shorter period of acclimatisation and orientation for their position as trustee. (I am sure Oscar might be able to tell us if he needed much time to adjust to the ways the board worked coming from the outside, and why not the other board members current and past too)
-- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]