Re: Release Candidate of the PostgreSQL Europe association statutes

On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 02:44:15PM +0100, damien clochard wrote:
> On Monday 14 January 2008 13:32:31 Koen Martens wrote:
> > 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..
>
> Actually the quorum is 30% of members present **or represented**. Someone that
> can't travel to the meeting may give his voice to a member that will be
> physically present. The statutes also allows voting by e-mail.

Still, if we go with the "auto-adding" of regional PUG members, I agree
that we're probably going to have a *big* problem reaching this quorum.

> > 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.
> >
>
> i'm ok with that.
>
> There's another quorum of 50% when the General Assembly has to discuss about
> dissolving the association. Do you want to drop that quorum too ?

How about lowering the quorum, but *also* require approval by the board?
Meaning that the GA and the board have to both agree to dissolev?

> > 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.
> >
>
> Actally only the half of the Board of Directors is renewed every year and
> members of the Board of Directors are elected for 2 years. So a complete
> takeover would take 2 years :-)

How's that going to work since we'll vote all boad members in the first
year? One will only be voted for one year? How do we decide which one?

> We can protect more the association by renewing only one third of the Board
> every year and members being elected for 3 years.

I think that's making things a lot harder than needed. Also, people have to
promise 3 years upfront - I think that's asking too much.

//Magnus