[Osmf-talk] AoA changes and new fee waiver for this year's AGM

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi Christoph,

On 11/9/19 11:29, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> Frankly this is fairly disappointing:

Sorry to hear that. I was a bit too terse with the announcement.
Apologies - there's a lot of stuff I have to wrap up in the next four
weeks before handing over to the next board.

> * i think i made a point well supported by facts and logic that in terms
> of fairness and balance w.r.t. times served on the board so far (with
> term lengths varying between one and four years) it would make much
> more sense to specify term limits through absolute time served (i.e.
> months) instead of terms.

Yes, and Simon suggested to get rid of time specifications altogether.

I think that it is good to avoid explicit time specifications in months
because you can otherwise end up with a situation where e.g. holding an
election on the 10th December means someone can stand and holding it on
the 11th means the same person cannot stand or vice versa. It would be
undesirable to invite machinations about moving the date of an election
to game the system. This is entirely avoided by simply working with
periods between elections.

> * The way votes 4, 5 and 6 have been staggered (support for vote 6 only
> having an effect if vote 4 and 5 also pass) seems politically highly
> biased and communicates to the members quite clearly that the board has
> a preference against strict term limits.  For the sake of board
> credibility i would strongly recommend changing that.  I know the board
> probably thinks this is a way to do this cleanly but you could equally
> do it the other way round:

Indeed I initially approached this in the "strict order of text
additions" that you mentioned, but two of my board colleagues found that
confusing because it first introduces a rule and then weakens it again;
it was suggested to instead stagger the votes to make the term limits
incrementally stronger.

It is true that the reverse (incrementally weaker) would also have been
an option but it was not considered. Considering it now I don't think it
is inherently better.

I am very politically biased in favour of strict term limits myself and
I would certainly not have agreed to anything that "communicates quite
clearly that the board has a preference against strict term limits"
(because the board does not have such a preference). This is something
you are reading into it. In fact, even though I did initially suggest
something along the lines of

4. add fixed terms
5. add strict term limits
6. weaken them by allowing a reset

I was happy to modify this to what we have now because I can now
campaign for "please vote yes on everything" which is more positive than
"please vote yes on everything except vote X". In fact, had we stuck
with my original suggestion, you could *easily* have claimed here on
this mailing list that the board was trying to game the vote by hoping
people would be more inclined to just check the "yes" box on everything
and therefore unwittingly weaken the term limits! It is much more
logical if every box you tick strengthens the limits, than if one box
gives you strong term limits and the next weakens it again.

> But even then technically implementing term limits would not technically
> depend on moving to a fixed term length scheme so connecting the two
> votes is somewhat questionable.

I am sure that ways could have been found to create independent wording
for the two paragraphs under discussion, but it is clear that any change
would have an effect on both. We would have had to present a matching
set of the two paragraphs in question for each possible combination of
selections that someone could make. I feared this would have led to a
combinatorial explosion.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"