[Council] Elections Announcement
 

Hello Community,

The main part of this post is simplified to a few sentences. If you want more details, you can read the "footnotes" below. (This post has been posted to the Maemo Council blog now that that works, but it seems the scripts to automatically duplicate the post to forum and mailing list are still broken, so reposting here manually).

As many of you are aware, the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors has come to be filled with all unelected Directors. [1]

There has been some significant desire to have a reelection take place once the infrastructure migration issues were settled. [2]

Those infrastructure issues are now essentially settled - we are running on our own servers (not the interim Nemein hosting), and our volunteer techstaff maintains essentially all of *maemo.org. [3]

The Hildon Foundation Council has the authority to call for the elections of both the Council and the Board of Directors, if there is unanimous agreement by all members on the Council. [4]

It is the position of this Council, that this Council was always intended to count as the Hildon Foundation Council. And thus we have the authority to trigger both elections simultaneously. [5]

Furthermore, even besides this point, a careful consideration of the Bylaws and the timings of the resignations and appointments of Directors from the Board, indicates that an election should have already been triggered by the Bylaws themselves. [6]

Having taken all of the above into consideration, we find that the desires and wellbeing of the Community is best served by us calling for the election of both the Council and the Board [7]. We have waited until the last possible moment in our term to call for this election of both bodies, to give the Board a chance to get everything done within a reasonable timeframe and then call for an election in accordance to the intended democratic spirit of our Hildon Foundation on their own.

Thus, we hereby announce the elections for both the Hildon Foundation Board and the Council.

Election nominations are now open! Please send nominations to the mailing list maemo-community@maemo.org . Do not be afraid to nominate yourself or those you think are suitable for the positions. The last time we barely scraped together enough candidates for both Council and Board.

Voting timetable:
2013-03-22:
Referendum was Announced
2013-04-09:
Nomination Period for Board/Council Begins
2013-04-22:
Referendum Contemplation Period Ends
Referendum Voting Begins
2013-04-23:
Nomination Period for Board/Council Ends
Board/Council Candidate Contemplation Period Begins
2013-04-29:
Referendum Voting Ends
2013-04-30:
Board/Council Candidate Contemplation Period Ends
Board/Council Election Voting Begins
2013-05-07:
Board/Council Election Voting Ends

- Elections Eligibility Criteria -

Eligibility criteria will likely remain the same as they have been, in as much as feasible. There is, however, a modifying circumstance: *.maemo.org account registration and login has been broken for months, until recently; furthermore, karma is /still/ broken, with a significant number of members missing a significant amouht of karma.

We will manually calculate karma for candidates, so the restrictions on candidates are the same as they have been. However, we think it is infeasible to manually count the karma for every user who might be eligible to vote. So unless there is a serious volunteer effort to calculate everyone's karma by hand, we will treat all maemo.org accounts older than 3 months as eligible for this election only (if it comes to pass that karma is still broken by the next election cycle, it will be up to that Board/Council, and the Community then, to sort out what to do.)

If people with newer accounts think they ought to be eligible to vote (for example, you would have registered earlier but it was impossible to do so at the time because the system was broken), please contact the Council by either responding to this message or, preferably, by emailing council@maemo.org. (Please note, while we will try to process requests for eligibility inclusions as late as possible, we can only realistically guarantee that we'll manage to do it if you get it in a week before the vote for the referendum takes place - so before the 15th of this month.)

- Footnotes -

[1] All three of the original Directors left over time. Texrat/Randall had to depart early on, and Rob (originally in the non-director position of legal adviser) was appointed to replace him. Ivgalvez/Ivan had to leave because he had to relocate himself and his family from one country to another. Tim left shortly after Ivan due to reasons that would take longer to explain than appropriate for this footnote, but which can be found here. Woody and Jim were appointed to replace Ivan and Tim respectively.

[2] Thread where Council solicited Community opinion on the matter of Board re-election. Also here, where both Jim and Woody (two of the current three Board members) indicate support for reelection. Also, a few of the Community members who come to the Council meetings on IRC have indicated a desire to see a re-election happen for several meetings now.

[3] We still do not have a final contract signed with Nokia, but that should not in itself be hindered by a reelection, because the next Board can sign the contract just as easily, and we are starting to suspect they'll get it done faster.

[4] §X ¶2 (¶3 if you count the separated-by-pagebreak paragraph as two) of the Hildon foundation bylaws. (The Board can also trigger an election of both bodies, but that's beside the point.)

[5] There was some disagreement (from one current Board member that we know of) whether this Council officially counts as the Hildon Foundation that the Bylaws refer to previous Council. The alternative would be that the election for electing a Council and the first Hildon Foundation Board members at the same time did not mean for the Council to be the Hildon Foundation Council. This, to be frank, is clearly not what any member of the Community would expect, since the Council was written in to the Hildon Foundation Bylaws as a way to formally include the already existing Council for communication with Nokia into the new, Nokia-independent framework. Nor is it what was intended by the person mainly responsible for writing the bylaws (Woody, who is currently another member of the Board). Finally, if the Hildon Foundation Council is not the current Maemo Community Council, then A. the Board has failed to appoint or call for the elections of a Hildon Foundation Council for 6 months, and B. this makes no logical sense because the election criteria for the Hildon Foundation are determined by the Hildon Foundation Council according to the bylaws. So if a Council wasn't intended to be initiated at the same time as Hildon Foundation Board was, how is Hildon Foundation supposed to execute an election of either the next Board or a Council, if there is no Council to set the election eligibility criteria?

[6] We only ever had 3 Directors. The bylaws state that the Board can spend at most seven days in a row with less than 3 directors, else an election has to happen. §IV ¶6 (¶7 if you count the paragraph split into two pages two paragraphs) of the Hildon Foundation bylaws. This has occured. This post counts the dates and times of official (in-writing) resignations and acceptance-of-assignment statements of Directors. Other earlier posts, for example by joerg, in the same thread, indicate that the same gap of more than 7 days applies to the informal resignation and acceptance statements.

[7] A more verbose/formal announcement can be seen here, in the latest Council meeting.

---
Mentalist Traceur,
(Alexander Kozhevnikov),
Council Chair,
Posting on behalf of the Council

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Lets do it

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Community members who haven't been following the maemo Community mailing list will be pleased to learn that we have two [1][2] self-nominations for the Council election.

These are Edoardo "kerio" Spadolini and Kurt H Maier. I presume (in some cases) their profiles are at [3],[4] and [5],[6] respectively. Both their Karma appear to be too low to qualify, but there are issues with its calculation and Council have already declared that they will manually check karma for candidates (see post #1).

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Glad to see "new blood", I'd rather not see any of the same faces that we already have.*
Not that most of them have done a poor job, far from it...
It's just best to make a fresh start, given all the bitter politics that has been happening.

Alas neither of these candidates seem to have a strong track-record of contributions, & neither seem to be terribly active "overall".
Plus it'd be good to have at least 1 candidate that has at least some experience with Harmattan/Nemo.
But I guess beggars can't be choosers.....

*with the exception of woody (maybe), assuming he hasn't developed a life-long allergic reaction to the whole process!

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

jalyst.

To be completely frank, if you are going to have an opinion on which type of candidates should fill up the positions then you should also have the guts to run for either body.

You fulfil your requirements so why not throw your name into the hat? :p

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Yes, I vote for Jalyst.

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

I doubt I'd have the right skill-set to properly fulfill what's required of me, then there's the fact that I'm a terrible manager of time...
I just wouldn't have the time to do the role well, "&" pursue everything in my real life, frankly, I think you'd make a much better candidate! ;-P
I think it's important to (politely) express our thoughts about candidates, we need to objectively weigh-up the pros/cons for each, + there should be some basic minimum benchmarks*.
Although admittedly, a thread like this probably isn't the most methodical/scientific way to asses those "throwing their hat into the ring".

*I can't recall if there's already a mechanism in place for this?

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

I think you should both run. :)


FWIW: I do plan to run for Board, in spite of everything that's happened. I still think it's important to have committed community members in HiFo and on Council, with the interests of the community being their core focus. Such members are needed more now than ever before.


To criticism that least one community member has leveled against me of late about my "tendency overrun others": I'll simply state that past events (recent and long ago) have shown the conspiracy that I will "do what I think is best despite what others/community feels" is simply false. I have never demanded to do things my way, nor do I hold up things based on my objecting to it, even when I know I'm right. :D Two key examples:

Recent (verifiable by any current admin member):
As a sub-admin, I found the rigid enforcement of some policies for the current servers to at times be counter-productive to getting stuff done. I do understand why these policies are in place though, and agree it's likely best for the community to have such policies in the long run. (And I hope said measures and watchdogs remain in place.) As a Director, I could have sought to pull rank and override those rules. I instead voiced my opinion on the topic, but continued to work within the bounds set, and encouraged others to do the same for the betterment of the community.

Past (verifiable by past Council & searching public archives here):
When I was Council, I disliked the idea of current Council being in the running and in the selection process for Community Awards. I felt that those that had merit and desire to stand (at least 2 did, IMHO) should bow out of the selection process. I objected to the practice, and stood by my conviction by not entering my name into the CA. But I did not hold the process hostage, demand others do as I thought was right, nor "overrun" others. The majority voted to move ahead, and there seemed to be no vocal criticism of it from the community when asked at the time. (And it was asked before hand, several times, via mailing lists, blog posts, meeting minutes, and TMO posts.) If I were ever to "do what I though was right, in spite of others opinions", that would have been a prime time to do so, no?

I invite those considering me as a candidate to reflect on my past actions and deeds, and decide for themselves if I'm proper material for Board. I will note that if I do not win a seat via election I will step down, but will continue to offer my skills in any capacity that is of use to the community. Including as an administrator, or consultant to the Board or Council, as I did for the current Council and Board in the last term.

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Seems to be no meaning of nomination if the Karma is to low?
As a new member I'll guess the Karma is down at bottom?

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

You can self-nominate and current Council will calculate your karma for you. A minimum of 100 is required to run so they'll inform candidates if they fulfil that requirement along with being a member for a minimum of 3 months.

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Please see wiki about karma and do an estimation first. When you never edited wiki, only posted 3 posts to tmo, and never did any of the other activities that gain you karma, it's very unlikely that you will have gathered the needed 100 points

/j

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Does the karma requirement apply to the Board election as well? Is there a karma requirement only in election, and not in direct appointment?

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

I think this is one of the outstanding issues... Council is supposed to come up with BoD election criteria.

If I understand it correctly.

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

This is correct.

For the last election, which was held before ByLaws were in effect, the karma requirement was set to 250 I believe. But that was somewhat arbitrary, and all the candidates in question had karma more than double that. All Board nominees had also been Council at some point. I'm hopeful that some past Council members will again step forward to inject some stability if nothing else.

To be clear, taking a position on Council or Board is a commitment, and shouldn't be taken lightly. It will take some free time, and for Board in particular there can be legal ramifications, as you're then operating as a representative of a legal entity.

Said politely, neither is really for "noobs", Board doubly so. :o I encourage those interested in running to attend Council and Board meetings, and talk to existing and past Council to get a clear picture of what is involved. It's not rocket science, by any means, but it's more than a 5 or 10 minute a week commitment. (Most times anyway.)

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

I admit I failed on tracking this as closely as it would've needed. So somewhat, since either other council members did as well, or I forgot sth that got mentioned, I'd assume we (preliminarily) apply identical rules to HiFo BoD and MCC/HFC candidates, i.e. 100 karma points and manual calculation. However I expect not many candidates for HiFo BoD that would have trouble with either 100 or 250 karma, unless they are actually not familiar with the duties of BoD at all (those who have an idea are very reluctant despite sufficient karma and standing in community). There are no such "fun" things like "opening up harmattan as much as possible" (which I lately heard in a private mail as one of the assumed perspectives of BoD) that BoD could actually do, neither BoD nor (*-)council have the power to do any such stuff. Both entities are not governance over community, you (the community) are the boss. So if there was any such thing like a hierarchy, it isn't like HiFo>council>community, it is

* Community > your-humble-proxy:council > the-treasurer:HiFo

(and harmattan even never been a matter of negotiations between Nokia and HiFo)

jOERG
(this is a private post which not necessarily represents any official notion of the council)

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

I understand that I probably don't have enough karma points to stand for election. That's fine; I never saw the point in amassing them, because I never felt the need to stand for election until the wild behavior exhibited lately.

However, I know full well what's implied by either position; please note I've been around maemo.org for a long time.

The reason I ask is because if Jim Jagielski intends to stand for election (and I hope he does) someone's going to need to figure out the karma situation.

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

A lot of people incl me are not exactly happy with the karma approach, particularly for HiFo. That's why I said "preliminarily" since I guess we (community) will like to discuss those eligibility rules before setting them up finally, for HiFo.
However as things are right now, we hardly have *any* other criterion on which we could decide a candidate's eligibility to run for HiFo BoD, during this election period.
As much as I agree that I would also like to Jim as a candidate for HiFo BoD, I think we (council) have little arguments to justify bending/breaking established rules to our own liking. We might apply karma calculation rules and 200 community members go and hit thanks button on Jim's tmo posts. Or we could start a regular referendum to get him in on "popular demand" if that's not conflicting with bylaws.Or one of the then-elected directors steps down and rest of directors appoints Jim. Anyway aiui Jim hasn't rejected acting as a affiliated councilor for BoD without being a regular director/member-of-BoD (http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...9&postcount=28)cheers
jOERG

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Beyond the scope of this thread I know but:

(1)
Can someone please point to exactly how/why this happened? (I have my basic ideas, but it may not be the "full picture")
(2)
What are ALL the ramifications compared to other Maemo flavours that have been "negotiated"?
(3)
Will there ever be a possibility to re-negotiate on this in the future?

If it's felt that a response to this here is inappropriate (no matter how invaluable it may be for others), then perhaps I could be PM'd instead.
If the latter were to transpire, then I can easily delete this post...

Cheers.

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Nokia refused to negotiate anything harmattan, as they say they still support the product. Also it was their decision to scatter harmattan assets all over the internet instead of either maemo.org or meego.com so those assets weren't included in the infra we got.


I can only assume and hope that when they decide to dump them they'll ask us first.

Aside from that I also concur that Karma requirements should probably stay the same this time and next council should initiate a discussion to change it (either the calculation or the requirement)

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Heh, that's really funny Nokia, really funny... :rolleyes:

Thanks, all that was my basic understanding too...
I just thought maybe there is more detail that I'm not aware of.
Here's hoping they do approach HF once they stop "supporting" Harmattan.

I guess all this nicely segues into this thread, which (sadly) remains lifeless.

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

I think Jim has made clear that he will happily act in other capacities (e.g. as an Adviser). I believe he understands the situation and would not feel he was maligned in any way if he's deemed ineligible to run. That said:

The HFC has the responsibility to write the qualifications. The ByLaws put that squarely in their venue. While I understand the current Council prefers (with good reason) to not alter the requirements from past elections (especially for HFC), it would be legally allowable by the ByLaws. This is especially true of setting requirements for Board, as there are no MCC based rules for them to abide by in that regard.

As a member of the community (not as a Director), there are two things I would personally like to see:

One is adding something like this to the requirements to stand for election to Board:

"One may also qualify to run for Directorship on the Board of Directors during an election if they have in the past severed as a member of MCC, HFC or the HiFo BoD."

That covers this "special case", and allows people the community has already viewed as competent the right to stand for BoD, even if their Karma is a bit sub-par to whatever minimums are set.

I'd also like to change Karma calculations to include a 5 point award (max 15 per calendar month) to non-Council/Board who attend Council or Board meetings. That would allow people who care enough to show up and participate a way to add Karma, even if they're not as active in the other means of calculation. That would require slightly better record keeping on the part of both bodies, but I think that's a reasonable expectation.

I would be willing to create a web interface (or Midgard plugin?) for Council/Board to enter this information if such a referendum were proposed and/or passed later. (I'm pretty sure Karma changes require a referendum.)

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

I am hopeful that future Board members would keep an open and established line of communication with Nokia. Further negotiations on ownership/distribution of material not covered under the current proposed contract, including Harmattan related items, is part of the Mission of the Foundation, IMHO.

To be clear: I do not think that those negotiation should be done now, or included in the currently pending contract, simply because that process has been extended to the point of causing technical problems already. But I see no reason HiFo can't place that request after signing for the rights already negotiated, and/or reminding Nokia of it's presence and desire to keep everyone in the family together every couple months. :)

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

That's for sure. In fact, my preference would be to be an advisor rather than a Director, since that would allow motivated people already in the community to feel empowered (sorry... buzzword) to help manage and direct the foundation.

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

[this is a copy crosspost, please answer over at http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...0#post1337800]

I'm nominating/suggesting for (mmc/hfc, see http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...47&postcount=7) council:
chemist
generalantilles
kerio
jaffa
me
mentalisttraceur
merlin1991
qwazix
sixwheeledbeast
texrat
thedead1440

I think kerio already has self-nominated, the others pending their accepting/rejecting to run

cheers
jOERG

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

council elections finished.
results:
http://maemo.org/vote/results.php?election_id=31
http://maemo.org/vote/results.php?election_id=33

more tomorrow
/j

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

OK, so it happened that HFC and MCC have different members now.
Does this cause general trouble and bad blood?

Re: [Council] Elections Announcement
 

Yes, it does.