[Foundation-l] "Expertise" board seats: the NomCom invites your feedback

[Michael Bimmler]

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:06 PM, Bence Damokos <bdamokos at gmail.com> wrote:
> About this list and wiki to be created: would the would be chapters with a
> chance of being approved before a Board approval on this question be
> invited?

I personally don't oppose it (though, in order to be fair, we would
need to draw a line, like "All those who have been recommended for
approval by ChapCom already") but I think this is something that the
chapters need to decide.

As a general comment (and I can thus avoid separately replying to
Thomas Dalton):

This is prima facie a chapters matter, as the seats are called "board
seats to be appointed by the chapters". Yes, the board will eventually
have to approve them de iure etc. but as said, the main idea was: The
chapters figure out a process and then appoint two people.

Therefore, I strongly urge that first we have all the chapter board
members together on the wiki and on the list and then, we can discuss
there whether there is a consensus agreement to open it up to the
public. I would personally be okay with discussing the appointment
processus in public, but I don't see much value in having a public
foundation-l-type discussion on whom we appoint, because then, we're
back to a general community appointments (read: quasi-election), which
was explicitly not what these seats were created for. This is not a
vote against transparency. But we have seats to be filled by NomCom,
seats to be elected, seats to be appointed by chapters, maybe we'll
once have a seat appointed by server admins, whatever. But we should
distinguish, otherwise, we'll just say that we have a 100%-elected
board, which is certainly worth considering, but for the moment, the
board decided against it.


> About ChapCom transparency: the ChapCom members have been helpful, but I
> don't find their work transparent. How does one chapter get approved by them
> (or even the Board) before incorporation, or just faster then the chapters
> presenting their bylaws roughly at the same time? Is the slowness in some
> cases deliberate to test the endurance and capabilities of a given community
> or even a contactperson? I don't think the answer is yes, yet without
> transparency and clear criteria, one cannot help to wonder, what is he doing
> wrong, and can have no idea how to correct his mistakes if the Chapcom is
> not approving the chapter, while other chapters "zoom by" at the same time.
>

It's very easy: Some bylaws are easier & shorter, some are less. This
doesn't mean that some are "better", but it's just that some bylaws
are very closely modelled on existing ones, and can therefore be
approved much more quickly, while others have a completely novel
structure which needs somewhat more time to understand, if we want to
do our job properly.

Michael
-- 
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler at gmail.com