[Osmf-talk] Board term limits and term lengths

[Christoph Hormann]

On Friday 21 April 2017, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> How important are term limits for you? Do you think board should
> revisit the issue? Do you perhaps even have a concrete suggestion? Or
> are things ok the way they are and we can shelve the issue?

I would be in favor of term limits and i also think this would be 
important for an organization like the OSMF which intends to represent 
the interests of the global OSM community.  Those who argue that 
members are free not to re-elect long term board members should bear in 
mind that the OSMF membership is only a small part of the OSM community 
and this is not likely to change fundamentally in the future.

Also arguments against term limits to me often seem to concentrate on 
what you might loose compared to what you might gain - which in my eyes 
is not a vey good approach to life in general.

Practically it seems to me the self regulating term lengths we have, 
while being somewhat ugly because it is not completely predictable in 
the long term and because of varying term length, has the huge 
advantage that they automatically de-synchronize the terms.  So it 
would probably be good to keep this concept.

This of course creates some difficulty in implementing term limits but 
this is not a big deal in my eyes.  We could for example introduce a 
simple rule that anyone who has served something like 3.5 years or more 
on the board is ineligible in any further election.  This could mean in 
some cases people could serve significantly longer in case they are 
re-elected just before reaching the limit and then have a relatively 
long term.  But that would in my eyes in no way defeat the purpose of 
term limits.

Using an non-integer cutoff would help avoiding borderline cases with 
the more or less yearly elections.  The exact limit is of course 
something that can be argued about but 3.5 years seems a relatively 
reasonable choice that would lead to a practical limit of 4-5 years.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/