Re: Release Candidate of the PostgreSQL Europe association statutes

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On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 08:44:43AM -0800, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> Koen Martens wrote:
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>> On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 01:09:46PM +0100, Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum wrote:
>>>
>>> On statutes, GA quorum of 30%.
>>>
>> 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..
>
> Can you just make the GA electronic? There are plenty of ways to do this.
> SPI uses IRC. Jabber might be better as it is authenticated (yes jabber
> does rooms).

My bet is on something web based, as i imagine that would attract the most
response. Although that takes out the interactive, but why would the votes
need to be interactive. Granted, an online session could improve effectiviness
off the discussion preceding the voting.

It all very much depends on 'who are your members' though. If there are
individual members, you are in an entirely different situation compared
to when your members are local groups. In the latter case, you probably
have the die-hard people who will attend GA's anyway, and a quorum seems
likely.

However, if we favor individual membership (which seems to be the trend
at the moment), a quorum will prove difficult to maintain. I wouldn't
go into mixed forms (a proposed model where local groups represent an
X amount of votes at the GA, that mix up with the individual votes
from individual members not in a local group). That would indeed violate
the KISS principle.

Other issues i've brushed against: anything we devise of for the EU group
should be compatible with the current local groups. We may decide for
example "local groups are automatically a member of the EU group" and then
some corolarry desicions, but these might very well conflict with the current
setup of some local group.

Anyway, straying a bit from the path here, all this talk of gpg suggests
a nice definition of being a member: having your gpg key on file and signed
by {some group representing somehow the EU assoc} makes you a member. Just
a thought.

Gr,

Koen

- --
K.F.J. Martens, Sonologic, http://www.sonologic.nl/
Networking, hosting, embedded systems, unix, artificial intelligence.
Public PGP key: http://www.metro.cx/pubkey-gmc.asc
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