[Foundation-l] Future Board election procedures and guidelines

[GerardM]

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.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 7/16/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 16/07/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> > > There are many more scenarios which are not beneficial. On the other
> > > hand there are also benefits, I happen to think that the disadvantages
> > > are not as large as the benefits.
> >
> > I can come up with a million scenarios in which a former employee
> > makes a bad candidate, and a million more in which a non-employee
> > makes a bad candidate.  If I had to try to balance the benefits and
> > detriments I'd guess that former employees would tend to make *better*
> > board members, however I don't think it matters anyway.  As long as
> > it's reasonably foreseeable that a former employee might make a good
> > board member, the rules shouldn't be prejudiced against them.
>
> Indeed.
>
> We're trying to write a rule here to avoid the potential harm from a
> malicious or troublemaking ex-employee. I think that, on the whole,
> the disadvantages (incompetent or evil) are a) pretty rare, and b) the
> sort of thing that an election process tends to work against anyway.
> We're not proposing a rule to say "bad candidates shouldn't run",
> we're proposing one which says "all of this group are bad candidates
> and shouldn't run". And that's really not a good idea for any group
> which has the potential to produce good candidates - indeed, it's easy
> to imagine a hypothetical excellent candidate coming out of that.
>
> But the handy thing is, we have a little referendum on this. We had a
> chance to ask the community, indirectly, "can an ex-employee be a
> decent candidate?"
>
> And whilst I do accept this isn't "about Danny", perhaps you will
> pardon this note: 29.2% of the community who registered an opinion
> thought that an outspoken ex-employee was worthy of a seat on the
> board. We appointed people on 30.1%. On the whole, the difference in
> votes between Frieda, Oscar, Michael and Danny was in the noise - it
> was virtually chance deciding which one of them won. There isn't
> overwhelming support there, but neither is there any kind of deep
> distrust.
>
> I am *deeply* uncomfortable with us setting a rule which says "three
> tenths of the community voted in ways we don't think they should
> have".
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
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