[HOT] Board Elections: another Personal Opinion

Jaakko Helleranta.com jaakko at helleranta.com
Wed Jan 16 15:05:18 GMT 2013


On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 12:53 AM, Heather Leson <hleson at ushahidi.com> wrote:

> things to be nailed down this year:
>
> 1. Membership policies, election format and growth strategy
>

+1

Having just become a voting member of HOT I want to share my response to an
email I just got congratulating me on the "membership":

I'd like to emphasize, though -- and would encourage others to do the same
-- that I have merely been granted the _voting_ member status in the
humanitarian OpenStreetMap community, which is formally/legally known as
the H.O.T.

I think that it would be really important that HOT would figure out a way
to call the people in the community-at-large members, too. And similarly
I'd like to see that voting members were called just that: _voting_ members.


I feel that this touches Katrina's email yesterday ("I'm _just_ an HOT
volunteer" .. emphasis mine, of course) and my own experience from the
three years I was involved with HOT as a "non-member". I think that in
order to build a solid global community of humanitarian mappers around OSM
we have to have a clear "equals status" for the community members at-large.

Should voting members possibly e.g. rather create a HOT council (or
congress or something) and should we maybe start calling all active people
in the community (HOT) members (.. or at least some sort of members)?

e.g.

Current voting member:

name=council member
old_name=voting member
short_name=voter(?)
description=the official/legal members of HOT, the non-profit organization


Community members:

name=community member
short_name=*member*
loc_name=HOT member (?)
description=all the wonderful active people that make HOT what it is and
pitch in to making OSM even better humanitarian mapping environment


The point of this is that while we surely need people who are especially
dedicated to developing/promoting HOT it's just as important that all who
have a humanitarian itch + interest in scratching that itch with OSM should
be made to feel equally welcomed to the community.

This is one of the two main reasons that I feel that it is important to
have people on the Board who are intimately involved with the emerging
communities / in the field as well as with other like-minded communities.

As per the question of compensated people on the Board question: I share
the thought that it is certainly a goal to aim for. But this is not a new
thing in good practices of organization management. The question I have is:
What is needed to make HOT a successful organization and what might risk
making it happen? And in contemplating that I think that having solid field
experience is at least as important as the other important factors.
But so, hopefully sooner than later we will have a situation where it's
possible to have a board with no employees in it _and_ where the board has
solid field experience that has been represented until now by Kate, Nico
and Mikel. And with Kate stepping down -- which is very good -- as the
director of the organization on the board is structurally the most
problematic case (purely in terms of management principles) -- I think it
would not be good for HOT if we would not see Nicolas or Severin on the new
board.

Other than Severin and Nicolas I want to +1 Heather for the board (as of
now); these are the three easy choices for me.. I'm not sure I have ever
_talked_ with Heather for more than 5 minutes, btw, but I am impressed by
pretty much all of what I know of her / see in her profile / character. And
diversification is not among the least important factors.

As for the other 4 to vote: I haven't made up my mind yet. .. I feel that
there are a number of equally good candidates -- and a few that I don't
feel I know well enough. ... All candidates that haven't pitched themselves
for the position yet: There's still time to do that!

Cheers,
-Jaakko

Ps. If HOT (hopefully) looks into it's election format I would (based on my
 prior experience with organizations' voting reforms) recommend that HOT
would change its election format to some sort of preferential voting system
such as the STV <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote> or
IRV <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_vote>. I would be also happy
to commit my time to an HOT electoral working group should such be formed
at some point.

--
jaakko at helleranta.com * Skype: jhelleranta * Mobile: +509-37-269154  *
http://go.hel.cc/about.me
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/hot/attachments/20130116/a36e5d8c/attachment.html>


More information about the HOT mailing list