Hello.

I would like to second that -- voting by proxy is indeed a common practice in organizations, commercial and non-commercial.  It is useful for organizations which are geographically disparate (as is somewhat the case with WMKE today, and may be much more the case in years to come!) making it difficult for members from regions far from the meeting venue to attend, thus creating a unintentional bias against their opinions.

My personal recommendation (I do not speak for the Foundation here) would be to allow voting by proxy under the following circumstances:
1. The board should decide a particular item on the next meeting's agenda is to allow voting by proxy.
2. The board must make public this decision sufficiently long in advance (say, at least two weeks before the meeting)
3. Proxy votes must be explicitly sent -- in writing or e-mail -- to both the proxy agent and the board, with the subject and the vote explicitly spelt out, e.g. "On the matter of wearing silly hats, I request that my proxy agent Asaf vote YES on my behalf." -- no later than 1 day before the meeting.

I also second Oliver's two restrictions (quoted below).

Again, this is just my personal opinion, and you are (of course) free to reject it in part or in whole.

(oh, and about 'chairman' -- as Abbas says, 'chairperson' is often used to avoid gender bias, as well as simply 'chair' -- which sounds strange to non-native speakers [certainly sounded very strange to me till I got used to it!], but is a little less cumbersome than 'chairperson'.)

   Asaf

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 4:40 AM, Oliver Stegen <oliver_stegen@sil.org> wrote:
Well, I know of several institutions (here in Nairobi even), which allow
members to vote by proxy - however, there are certain restrictions:
a) a member can only give his/her proxy to another member,
b) no voting member may hold more than one additional proxy.
Does that sound like a reasonable compromise?
Oliver (aka BT)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikimediake-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediake-
> bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Limoke Oscar
> Sent: 09 June 2011 12:58
> To: The discussion list for the upcoming Wikimedia Kenya chapter.
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Kenya] WMKE Articles & Memorandum of Association
> (Semi-final draft)
>
> Grace,
> > proxy-i don't really know about this but ave never heard of a company
> > that doesn't give its members the opportunity to vote by proxy.
> ...and i have never seen a company that allows a member to send
> someone tp vote for them...really where does it happen i send say my
> brother to go vote for say x??or about issue y?which he has no idea
> of....?makes no sense at all.collecting dividends and staff,yes proxy
> is accepted but vote??really?? or maybe i don't get the context of
> "proxy"...
>
> Abbas,yes should one be absent on voting days,he/she forfeits his/her
> vote,that's my thought....
>
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    Asaf Bartov
    Wikimedia Foundation