Re: Release Candidate of the PostgreSQL Europe association statutes

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On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 01:09:46PM +0100, Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 01:04:15PM +0100, Koen Martens wrote:
> > It is mentioned "For the General Assembly to be validly constituted a
> > quorum of 30% of the total number of members must be present or
> > represented.". Is there no danger of the association ending up in dead
> > water if you require such a big amount of members to be present? In my
> > experience, only the 'die hards' ever come to these GA's anyway. I
> > think most GA's (from political organisations and non-profits such as
> > FFII) i've been to attract maybe one percent of the members, if not
> > less (counting represented members also).
>
> Have you read the following sentence which takes care for exactly this
> problem?

Ah, yes, a retry within 30 days. Is this practical? I mean, it being a european organisation, it is safe to assume people who will attend the GA will have to make plans in advance. Meaning that if you schedule another one within 30 days, it is likely a lot of the attendees will not be able to come (budget, no holiday left, etc..). I think it is nearly impossible to have 30% present, so that would mean two GA's within 30 days almost by default. It should probably be considered if this is indeed what we would want..

Now, a simple solution would be to drop the quorum. This is not uncommon. An objection to dropping the quorum could be democratic validity, but as said I think in practice you will always end up with a non-quorumed GA within 30 days anyway, so democractic calidity is not an argument.

You might want to think about a safeguard against 'takeovers' too: a rush of new members right before a GA because some malicious party wants to take-over the voting.

Sorry to be nitpicking, but that's what writing statutes is about :) Assume the worst, and try to make rules that prevent that.

Gr,

Koen

- --
K.F.J. Martens, Sonologic, http://www.sonologic.nl/
Networking, hosting, embedded systems, unix, artificial intelligence.
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