Hello. I would like to second that -- voting by proxy is indeed a common practice in organizations, commercial and non-commercial. It is useful for organizations which are geographically disparate (as is somewhat the case with WMKE today, and may be much more the case in years to come!) making it difficult for members from regions far from the meeting venue to attend, thus creating a unintentional bias against their opinions. My personal recommendation (I do not speak for the Foundation here) would be to allow voting by proxy under the following circumstances: 1. The board should decide a particular item on the next meeting's agenda is to allow voting by proxy. 2. The board must make public this decision sufficiently long in advance (say, at least two weeks before the meeting) 3. Proxy votes must be explicitly sent -- in writing or e-mail -- to both the proxy agent and the board, with the subject and the vote explicitly spelt out, e.g. "On the matter of wearing silly hats, I request that my proxy agent Asaf vote YES on my behalf." -- no later than 1 day before the meeting. I also second Oliver's two restrictions (quoted below). Again, this is just my personal opinion, and you are (of course) free to reject it in part or in whole. (oh, and about 'chairman' -- as Abbas says, 'chairperson' is often used to avoid gender bias, as well as simply 'chair' -- which sounds strange to non-native speakers [certainly sounded very strange to me till I got used to it!], but is a little less cumbersome than 'chairperson'.) Asaf On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 4:40 AM, Oliver Stegen <oliver_stegen(a)sil.org> wrote: -- Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ WikimediaKE mailing list WikimediaKE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediake