[Foundation-l] Future Board election procedures and guidelines

[Andrew Gray]

On 16/07/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at 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.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk