Initial Board Election Procedure

The nomination process opened Monday, March 5th. With an email to the discuss list: https://mail.osgeo.org/servlets/ReadMsg?listName=discuss&msgNo=168

Nominations should be sent directly to the discuss@mail.osgeo.org list. This is to make the process more open, and so that everyone knows who else has been nominated. This also can open the door for a bit of discussion about people's merits and qualifications by members of the list.

Nominators must get approval from their nominee before sending their name to the discuss list. The board (Chris Holmes) will check with them to confirm that they do accept the nomination, to avoid having to turn it down in a public forum. I will also confirm that they are willing to take on a workload of 8 hrs/week.

Non-voting members (nvms) should be encouraged to contribute to the discuss list, make their voice heard on the list. Being a voting member just means you get to actually vote, but the process of nomination and discussion should be open to all, nvms can get a say in the process by publicly saying who they would support.

Any member can nominate someone for the board. For the initial bootstrapping of the board, only voting members may be nominated. The recently approved bylaws have said that non-voting members can also stand for board, but for this round the email indicated that one must be a voting member, and the bylaws had not yet been passed.

The nomination period will last until Tuesday, March 14th at 15:00 UTC (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=3&day=14&year=2006&hour=15&min=0&sec=0&p1=0 for the time in your country). The nominations, along with relevant discussion from the discuss list, will be compiled into an html document, to be posted on March 15th.

Votes will be due Friday, March 17th at 22:00 UTC. (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=3&day=17&year=2006&hour=22&min=0&sec=0&p1=0)

Each member will have four votes that they can distribute, from all to one candidate to one per each candidates. Votes will be sent to a vote@board.osgeo.org, where Rich Steele (as secretary) and Chris Holmes will tally. This will be an private list, readable only by the secretary and the designated board member(s). Only foundation voting members will be allowed to post to it.

The first full board meeting will hopefully occur Monday, March 20th. This should give the new board members to read through the archive, and for all of us to sync up the best time to meet.

Want to be a Board Member
From http://flossfoundations.org/ Some reflections on making decisions about whether to get involved in foundational efforts:
 * Turn it down if you think you wouldn't make a good leader
 * Turn it down if you don't have time to do a good job. (Time commitment for OSGeo ~ 8hrs/week)
 * Turn it down if you don't think they should be starting a foundation in the first place.
 * Turn it down if you don't care about the goals they're trying to accomplish.