On 16/07/07, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, You misrepresent what is proposed. What is proposed is that employees and ex-employees for a period of one year are not eligible to stand for the position of board member.
As a consequence your whole argument does not address the issue.
My apologies - the one year (or six months, or whatever) is still a little shaky to my mind in terms of its justification, but has the excellent merit of being a nice clear "cooling off" period. It has much less of the air of presupposing malice, and does prevent hastiness. It's a bit odd, but it's measured and sensible.
It also allows us to apply it fairly to contractors and interns and so on - as it is, unilaterally banning someone who worked as an intern for a few months seems excessive, and you can get into all sorts of quibbles about whether or not a contractor was employed, etc. And perhaps, for transparency's sake, we could apply it to any potential employee of a chapter?
"If you have received money for services rendered to the Foundation or a recognised local chapter, not counting reimbursements for out-of-pocket expenditure, then you cannot run for a position on the WMF Board of Trustees for [one year] from the date of the most recent payment" - or something like that.
(And we should *certainly* have a converse policy - once on the board, you can't receive employment from the Foundation or a chapter within a set period! That's by far the bigger conflict of interest...)
*However*, I note that under your proposed rule Danny would still have been unable to run, and as such my argument is still pretty much exactly the same - 29.2% of the electorate voted for someone you would want us to have ruled out of the running, almost enough to win him a seat, and we need to consider the implications of that little detail.