[Osmf-talk] Community vote (was: AoA Discussion)

[James Livingston]

On 19/07/2011, at 6:44 PM, Tom Chance wrote:
> 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.

I don't think that's any more of an issue with EGMs than AGMs. Are people who have to vote by proxy at a unreasonable disadvantage? If so, then we need to fix that generally, so that people who can't make the AGM in person aren't at the same disadvantage.

As a global project, important things like AGMs and EGMs need to deal with the fact that a large portion of the membership won't be there, and they still need their say.


> If a minority of say 55 out of 3,000 members could force an EGM then a national chapter could force an EGM.

Personally I don't think that people on the current board, or people running for the board in future, are likely to be crazy power-hungry people, and I don't think that the membership consists of lunatics wanting to force EGMs to disrupt everything.

Every EGM I've been to has been because the board called it, wanting to pass constitutional changes needed before the next AGM. While it's an important thing if it ever needs to be invoked, it's one of those rules that ideally doesn't get used.


> It might be held in their country and they would easily weild a majority vote.

I don't know that the alternative is better, the EGM is not held in their county so they get ignored.


> - a higher threshold for an EGM, or

I agree you don't want it low, but I think something like 20% (which someone mentioned) is too high. Making up a number, say half the membership care enough to vote, you need 25% of the membership to carry a decision at an EGM, so 20% to even call one seems excessively onerous, because I don't think anyone is going to try calling one without a decent reason.


> - 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

I think that would only make sense if everywhere had a national chapter. If some countries don't, then they have a strange advantage.

The only reasons I can think of for a member-called EGM boils down to being a publicity stunt to annoy people, or because they want to remove the board. If a whole country of mappers actually believes that the OSMF board needs to be called to task in an EGM, then something is seriously wrong and perhaps an EGM is needed to deal with it.


> - 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

As above, that only really makes sense if no-one is a member of OSMF directly but instead OSMF becomes an association of local mapping chapters. I'm sure there would also be a lot of argument about the fact that a country whose local chapter has 5000 members only has as much say as one with 10.


> 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.

+1.  I'm favour of a simple percentage since it works okay, and dealing with the problem of size when it starts to happen. I don't know if we need something in the articles about a review, since I generally trust the membership and board to deal with it when it happens, but I'm not strongly opposed to it if other's feel it's needed.