Re: Release Candidate of the PostgreSQL Europe association statutes

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.

>
> 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 ?

> 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 :-)

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

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

thanks for these remarks !

--
damien clochard
http://dalibo.org | http://dalibo.com