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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>Hello HOT,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>A huge thank you to the HOT Voting Members who assembled together yesterday to ratify an amendment to our Bylaws. This was not an easy task and actually over the past several months the Board of Directors, Governance Working Group and myself have spent a lot of time looking at our current state and asking ourselves how we overcome the difficulties of being a globally inclusive membership. The short take I have gathered from our Members is that the majority felt our Bylaws were too restrictive as they are similar to those of a more traditional, typically geographically close and of one language, non-profit/NGO whose members physically assemble for meetings; which our group is definitely not. Therefore I believe that our Members made a good choice to reduce our quorum requirement to one-fourth (1/4) so we can assemble a more reasonable amount of Members to conduct business of the organization without punishing Members who have previously demonstrated their ability to contribute towards our mission but are greatly hindered by language, time zone and/or reliability of the internet where they are to attend meetings. It is not the only work needed to be done to utilize our membership’s talents and increase their ability to contribute to our mission; and I know our members are keenly aware that we need to maintain the integrity of our organization by allowing Members to participate more asynchronously while still being held accountable. However, I personally believe this is a step in the right direction as only with the use of Proxy attendance were we able to finally have a majority of Members represented at a meeting. Once again, thank you to everyone who made the effort to attend or find a Proxy to attend on your behalf, meetings should be a little less painful to pull off from here forward.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The details of the meeting are now linked from the HOT wiki-page or can be viewed directly, here: <a href="https://docs.google.com/a/hotosm.org/document/d/19b9g_yyo9kNmNTsuOYLjQ0JS0xgF0maaiZApnBQ_Vm0/edit">https://docs.google.com/a/hotosm.org/document/d/19b9g_yyo9kNmNTsuOYLjQ0JS0xgF0maaiZApnBQ_Vm0/edit</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Sincerely,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Russell Deffner<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Chairperson for the Voting Members<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="mailto:Russell.Deffner@hotosm.org">Russell.Deffner@hotosm.org</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://hot.openstreetmap.org/">http://hot.openstreetmap.org/</a> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>