[HOT] Governance WG 1st meeting next week - please note your availability!

[Jaakko Helleranta.com]

Dear all,

As a follow-up to Mikel's email
<https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/hot/2014-August/005687.html> on
boosting the working groups I'd like to call for the first meeting of the
Governance Working Group for next week.

First and foremost: As a quick check for interested people's availability
before nailing the exact date and time *please mark the times that work for
you. Let's make this a quick 1-day check and I'll announce the date/time at
the end of my Friday* (Central American time, GMT-6). The Doodle link is
http://doodle.com/cr3ezb974in3wxgr

In case your time zone settings are weird please note that I opened
possible times for the WG meeting as one hour slots for all days
Monday-Friday between 2pm and 5pm UTC. This seems to be the least
inconvenient time for all of us
<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=20140811&p1=224&p2=143&p3=263&p4=136&p5=195&p6=170&p7=108&p8=145>.
("Luckily" we don't have active community members in Hawaii, that I would
know of..)

So, what are we expecting to discuss / do at the Governance WG?

We have a number of governance related matters that we should discuss and
improve in the near future. However, the Board identified in its
face-to-face meeting that the most burning governance related issue that we
have is the quorum that our bylaws requires for the voting members meetings
to be legit. The majority requirement has proved so tough for us to reach
that we haven't in fact had a single legit voting members' meeting since
the current bylaws were approved in end of 2011.

We've already drafted the process that is required for the bylaws change to
happen in pretty high level of detail and it's actually quite straight
forward. The whole process does not need to take much more than a month --
including the voting members meeting. I'll spell this out in a separate
note that in the coming days. I think that this is an excellent first task
for the Governance WG to take on and I envision that we could well be able
to tackle this in one meeting, or two at most.

I discussed the matter with the voting members' chair, Russ Deffner,
earlier this week who shared the thought that this would be a good first
task for the WG and seconded the need to fix the quorum problem as soon as
possible.

So, I suggest that we would nail this quorum problem in our first
meeting(s) and then move on to other issues. We can of course start listing
other governance related issues that we should handle in the WG. But before
solving the quorum problem our basics aren't functioning properly. So first
things first, I think.

This said, all interested community members, please note your availability
in the above linked Doodle.

With best regards,
-Jaakko
--
jaakko at helleranta.com * Skype: jhelleranta * Mobile: +505-8845-3391 (Nicaragua)
* Voice(mail) / SMS / What's app: +1-202-730-9778 * http://about.me/jaakkoh
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