[Osmf-talk] Community vote (was: AoA Discussion)
Tom Chance
tom at acrewoods.net
Tue Jul 19 08:44:19 UTC 2011
On 19 July 2011 09:08, James Livingston <doctau at mac.com> wrote:
> On 19/07/2011, at 5:15 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> > Such actions usually require a certain percentage of members to agree.
> Currently, if something goes really really wrong, I could conceivably look
> at the members list, call 30 of them on the phone, convince them to share my
> concern, and voila, I'd have 10% of members on my side. (Needless to say I
> would need a good reason that convinces them but it is conceivable.) - If we
> had 3000 members instead of 300, that would become near impossible; the
> board would become ever more unassailable.
>
> Rather than a percentage, a few associations I've been part of have used an
> absolute "N members". That however has problems when the organisation grows,
> as increasingly small minorities can force EGMs. There have been cases in
> Australia where large companies had to hold EGMs at a cost of hundreds of
> thousands of dollars because 0.01% of the shareholders wanted to pull a
> political stunt.
>
> Maybe something like the "square-root" rule could be used, which means
> you'd need 18 people with 300 members (6%) and 55 with 3000 (1.8%), so it
> does increase but not linearly.
Here is another reason to want a reasonably high threshold for an EGM is
geography. Our members are dispersed around the world, and assuming we have
AGMs in the real rather than the virtual world that involves a substantial
travel cost for members who want to attend. Even with proxy voting, you
would incur a large expense.
If a minority of say 55 out of 3,000 members could force an EGM then a
national chapter could force an EGM. It might be held in their country and
they would easily weild a majority vote.
There are a few ways organisations deal with this:
- a higher threshold for an EGM, or
- additional requirements for an EGM vote relating to national chapters,
e.g. that no single chapter's members can account for more than 50% of the
vote
- moving to a delegate voting system, where each national chapter gets a
single vote to be used on the basis of agreements in the chapter that were
themselves arrived at democratically, or
I would favour keeping a simple percentage rule like 5% or 10% for now, but
insert into the articles that once the OSMF grows to a particular size (say
5,000 members) this should be reviewed. In the meantime, a working group
could discuss those options in more detail.
This was the solution chosen by the English & Welsh Green Party. It meant we
could get on with business while size wasn't a problem, and begin
preparations in a more calm fashion for the time when size is a problem
(which we've now reached).
Regards,
Tom Chance
--
http://tom.acrewoods.net http://twitter.com/tom_chance
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