Okay, so, here is some backstory/explanation, on top of what everyone else gave, as well as some commentary towards the end:

1. Back when the Hildon Foundation was still being /formed/, it was intended and frankly understood by those involved that the "Hildon Foundation Council" in the community bylaws was essentially to replace the Maemo Community Council - which only exists informally from a legal standpoint.

2. They were alway intended to be essentially the same body, with the Hildon Foundation Council doing the usual Maemo Community Council things. The only changes were to fix the 3/5-candidates issue, an explicit inclusion of the 1-week "contemplation" period between candidacy announcements and actual voting (which is not actually in the Maemo Community Council rules), getting rid of the Nokia rep thing, and the thing stated in point #3 below:

3.A. Because the Hildon Foundation bylaws needed to legally/formally provide for elections, there was also some need to have a way of determining who is eligible to vote. Instead of copying the system of eligibility verbatim from the current Maemo Community Council rules, or handcoding some other explicit system into the bylaws, the bylaws state that the Hildon Foundation Council has the responsibility of coming up with the election eligibility requirements - no, it does not have to call for a referendum to do so, like the Maemo Community Council would.

3.B. The above is a good thing: remember, when the bylaws were written, we the community had no idea how things would turn out. For all we knew the karma system would be dead, all or some of the karma-relevant data (from which karma could still be computed by hand) lost irretrievably during the Nokia-to-Community infrastructure changeover, etc. It also allowed for the Council to change the election eligibility much more responsively than with a referendum (remember, not the election /rules/ - not who wins/loses or how they do it - just who is eligible to vote or be nominated for a position).

4. Point #3 might seem like a "power grab" - but it was the product of uncertain times. I would argue, in fact, that it has little potential for abuse in practice: In the entire time I've been in this community, when councilors or board members abused/"abused" their limited powers, it was in ways far less radical than the level of asinine it takes to try to rig the election eligibility in a way that biases things in your favor, but more importantly, such abuses have never really been supported by the others elected to those positions.

5. The LAST Council election, which also elected the first Hildon Foundation Board, was intended by those setting up Hildon Foundation to elect this Council for /both/ of the "Council" entities. The idea (as I have always understood it from everything said) was that during the transition from Nokia to Community ownership, the Council would be simultaneously the Maemo Community Council and the Hildon Foundation Council - then during the next Council election, we would simply elect the Council as the Hildon Foundation Council.

In other words, the Maemo Community Council "entity" and the Hildon Foundation Council "entity" would be one entity for one Council term, and then the "Maemo Council Entity" would be phased out. What this referendum is trying to do was always what was intended to happen. So why is it not already so?

6. A little while ago Rob (SD69) claimed that in his eyes, the current Council did /not/ count as the Hildon Foundation Council. This went outside of what (as I understand it) most of the community considered to be the case. I frankly think that Rob is wrong, and we /are/ both Councils, and I know I'm not the only one. But because we never made it explicit last election, and Rob is a Board member, it seems the case that in this upcoming election, we need to hold the elections explicitly for both Council 'entities' (although if we are not the Hildon Foundation Council, it is arguably not within our authority to hold a Hildon Foundation Council election - it's this kind of chicken-egg problem that I think makes Rob's interpretation non-sensible).

7. But if we are holding elections for both Council entities, naturally there's the problem of "we don't want two Councils" - no one here that I know of wants two Councils (many want zero Councils). So then the logical options are to either:

A. Hold both election simultaneously as if they were one body (and either hard-code the rules governing both Councils such that no one can run for just one of them, or hope no one throws a spanner in the works by explicitly saying "I am nominating myself for Maemo Community Council, but not Hildon Foundation Council".) Note that, if we are doing A as the long term solution, then we have to ADD the "you must run for both Councils at the same time" to the eligibility for nomination rules by either adding it to this referendum or starting another one, AND all Councils following that must not either intentionally or accidentally delete that provision for the. Also, any change, even one clearly supported by the Community, to the bylaws that in any way conflicts with the current Maemo Community Council rules would require a 30-days-to-get-to-a-vote referendum (actually, that's the thing - the bylaws change can pass instantly and apply to the "Hildon Foundation Council" 'half' of the Council immediately, and then the Council can be potentially paralyzed until the referendum updates the "Maemo Community Council" part of the ruleset). Mind you the Council is the body /more/ likely to be responsive to the "will of the people" than the Board, if the current situation is any indication of how the future will be like.

- or -

B. to agree as a community to merge them - my understanding when we were discussing this referendum, was that the "transform" wording meant explicitly this. I also think this is the long-term better approach, because of the problems mentioned above.

For that matter, look at this referendum: this wouldn't even be a thing if we didn't have two separate entities formally, for the same purpose and intended to be the same entity. If we keep them /both/ under the reasoning "well their rules are identical now and we can think of them as one", that's fine for a while, but I guarantee you we'll be dealing with this kind of stuff eventually - having to do some wierd formality of making sure that the rulesets are matched while half of the community (and even members of the elected bodies in question) ends up looking at the situation thinking "wait, wtf is going on? This Council is really two different entities with two identical rulesets, but one of them requires a 30-day referendum to change?". If we want to avoid politics fatigue in the future, this is exactly what we don't want. Me personally, both as a Council member AND more importantly as a community member, I find this formality-split in what everyone agrees ought to be a single entity to be the source of the most time wasting, legalese mitutia conflicts, and general headache (for me at least, literally) out of everything that has happened since we started this journey of being a community-run non-profit. I assure everyone that at least on my end, this referendum is an effort to remove as much of the unnecessary, technicalities-that-don't-serve-anyone politics as possible.

[Sidenote: we could do A for now, do B eventually. This is what I originally expected would happen, but IF this referendum passes (and people don't insist that "transform" didn't mean option B), we don't have to do A at all, because the 'merge' will have resolved before the new election cycle. If this referendum fails, we /have/ to do A this election cycle (except by then it'll be too late to update the eligibility rules by referendum to prevent people from running for one Council but not the other, so we'd be back to hoping no one does that).]

Effectively the /only/ "power grab" enabling aspect of this change is that the bylaws do not inherently require the Hildon Foundation Council to go through the community referendum process to change the rules that govern the elections (maybe, I think Woody and others might argue even this isn't really the case - though I think the bylaws as written don't support that position). But even IF that's true, there's nothing stopping the very first set of election criteria advanced by the first officially-recognized-as Hildon Foundation Council from saying "These rules may not be changed again except by referendum.", if that's what people really want.

Maybe the meeting times and various other tidbits are hardcoded into the Maemo Community Council rules as well, but if so, does anyone really want to claim we should have 30 days for debate if it ever becomes desirable to change details like that? Most of the really damaging stuff that the Council can currently do (not necessarily has the formal power to do, but can probably make happen by asking the right people) is not subject to referendum anyway. For example, two meetings ago, it was suggested that we should remove speedpatch and batterypatch packages from the extras and extras-testing repositories. One of the main reasons nothing has happened yet on that front was because I said "I want to start a thread asking the community for input on the issue first", even though I agreed with the reasoning provided for doing so. (Speaking of: I'll be putting that thread up sometime within the next 24 hours at the latest, I promise.) If other people were on the Council than the current batch, it's possible that would've just /happened/ without community input, as nothing in the Maemo Community Council rules prevents it any more than the Hildon Foundation bylaws do. So if we're trying to avoid abuse of power (as we should), we should focus on other things - coming up with ways to modify the bylaws to fix those issues, then electing Councilmembers and Board Directors who will enact the desired changes in the bylaws.

I completely agree, actually, that there should be power for the community to trigger referendum to kick people out of elected positions. But that's completely besides the point for THIS referendum and voting no on it will not in any way help us get to that goal.

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Thank you, everyone who took the time to read this - I know it's rather long.