[Foundation-l] Future Board election procedures and guidelines

Mon Jul 16 20:11:28 UTC 2007

On 16/07/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:

> > There are many more scenarios which are not beneficial. On the other
> > hand there are also benefits, I happen to think that the disadvantages
> > are not as large as the benefits.
>
> I can come up with a million scenarios in which a former employee
> makes a bad candidate, and a million more in which a non-employee
> makes a bad candidate.  If I had to try to balance the benefits and
> detriments I'd guess that former employees would tend to make *better*
> board members, however I don't think it matters anyway.  As long as
> it's reasonably foreseeable that a former employee might make a good
> board member, the rules shouldn't be prejudiced against them.

Indeed.

We're trying to write a rule here to avoid the potential harm from a
malicious or troublemaking ex-employee. I think that, on the whole,
the disadvantages (incompetent or evil) are a) pretty rare, and b) the
sort of thing that an election process tends to work against anyway.
We're not proposing a rule to say "bad candidates shouldn't run",
we're proposing one which says "all of this group are bad candidates
and shouldn't run". And that's really not a good idea for any group
which has the potential to produce good candidates - indeed, it's easy
to imagine a hypothetical excellent candidate coming out of that.

But the handy thing is, we have a little referendum on this. We had a
chance to ask the community, indirectly, "can an ex-employee be a
decent candidate?"

And whilst I do accept this isn't "about Danny", perhaps you will
pardon this note: 29.2% of the community who registered an opinion
thought that an outspoken ex-employee was worthy of a seat on the
board. We appointed people on 30.1%. On the whole, the difference in
votes between Frieda, Oscar, Michael and Danny was in the noise - it
was virtually chance deciding which one of them won. There isn't
overwhelming support there, but neither is there any kind of deep
distrust.

I am *deeply* uncomfortable with us setting a rule which says "three
tenths of the community voted in ways we don't think they should
have".

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk