Re: Release Candidate of the PostgreSQL Europe association statutes

On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 03:24:16PM +0100, Koen Martens wrote:
> > > 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.
>
> Even with representation i do not think the quorum will easily be reached. The point is not that people are not only not able to come, but perhaps are disinterested in coming. Of course, I might be wrong here, but in my experience most people are not interested in visiting GA's. It is not that they don't care perse, but they probably think that those who _do_ show up will do the Right Thing.

Exacactly my point. And this will be much more so if we automatically
consider members of the regional/national groups members of the EU group by
default, without a separate membership. A whole lot of them won't care.

ANother option would be to assign members of the actual EU group (that
don't have a national org) an individual vote, but assign member groups a
group vote. Like pgfr would get 50 votes or something (example!). Then the
board of pgfr would decide where those votes go, because the board of pgfr
was voted by the members of pgfr.

> > > > 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?
>
> This is indeed a different matter. I'd vote for requiring the 50% quorum, because of
> the extraordinary nature of such a proposal. I'd say that, if we have such a proposal,
> it would be suitable to have an online vote.
>
> I'm a bit wary of online voting though, because that is inherently suspectible to fraud. On the other hand, it is not as if we are deciding the faith of a country here...

If we don't allow online voting, we will *never stand a chance* of reaching
the quorum. If even 5% or 10% of the voters turn up, it's a great success.
(Either that, or we have so few members that the whole pgeu is a failure)

> > > > 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 :-)
>
> Or, give voting right to people who have been paying member for at least x months.

I thought the current track had us not asking for membership fees...

But that's one of the reasons to actually ask for a membership fee. It
doesn't have to be large...

//Magnus