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

[Christoph Hormann]

On Saturday 09 November 2019, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> 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.

At the cost of having - in the extreme case - the inbalance of treating
board members who have served three one year terms the same as board
members who have served three four year terms.

The incentives for moving the election date would be quite readily
apparent in cases that indeed happened - but you'd have to move it in
total for at least six month to have an effect so it is extremely
doubtful this would practically happen.  And after all if there is a
majority on the board to keep someone as board member beyond the term
limits the board would have the simple option to appoint them as such
without a members vote.  No need for trickery with the dates.

The motivations for counting whole terms instead of counting months are
of course also quite readily apparent from the table on

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation

> 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

For clarification in case i have not expressed myself that well:

* if i say the board does something or criticize the board for doing
something that always refers to the effective majority of the board
members.  I am fully aware that the board consists of seven different
people with different values and opinions and that there are decisions
made by the majority that a minority strongly disagrees with.
* when i said 'you communicate' that was meant to say it is perceived as
such - not necessarily that it is communicated with that intention.  I
should probably have written "it looks quite strongly like the board
[...]".

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