[Foundation-l] Election rules modification regarding suffrage issues raised on this list

[phoebe ayers]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 11:41 PM, Philippe Beaudette
<philippebeaudette at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Based on concerns raised on this list, the elections committee is changing
> the requirement from "at least 50 edits between April 1, 2008 and June 1,
> 2008" to "at least 50 edits between January 1, 2008 and June 1, 2008". We
> hope this will avoid disenfranchising active community members, while
> ensuring that longtime-inactive users cannot vote on this important current
> issue.

Thanks Philippe & Elections committee for taking our concerns into
consideration and making this change! The new requirement sounds much
more reasonable.

I also agree with Michael's last post that mail to voters + a
sitenotice to try and increase turnout would be a good thing. :) Be
sure to tell your friends who may be off-wiki this year as well.

I note btw that the *candidate* requirements didn't change -- so any
potential candidates need to have been editing this spring. I don't
have a problem with this requirement (community representatives should
probably be active editors), but it does notably exclude "inactive"
members from running, regardless of their former status in the
community or current off-wiki participation (it'd be nice to see a
developer exemption!).

As our community grows and changes, and we try to formalize community
participation in governance in various ways, I think this question
will come up more and more. Once a community member, always a
community member? Is there something special about actively
participating now vs. having actively participated in the past? Does
editing one of the projects make you a member of the Foundation
community? (it's certainly not just posters to foundation-l!) What
*does* make for a community member? I tend to define "the community"
very broadly, but realize others may not...

best,
-- phoebe