[steering-discuss] Preparing elections for the membership committee

Dear SC (and probaly BoD :wink: ) members,

as we have discussed previously, the paragraphs about the membership committee in the current statutes draft differ in some points from what we have in the bylaws. I hope, I can provide a translation of the relevant paragraphs early next week. But I want to have some discussion on the matter already in the first BoD meeting.

Reason for that is, that the MC should be elected by the TDF members (and not appointed by the BoD). But the BoD would be responsible to prepare and monitor the MC elections. The MC will be an official body of the Foundation and therefore it's members will be named on inauguration of the Foundation. For this first MC, we to not need to tion exactly follow the elecion rules, as it's members will be named by the founder. But I think, we all agree, that it would be best to start with an elected MC (rather to just appojnt some people).

Ok, main differences (for compostion and duties) in the statutes (compared to current bylaws) are:

- MC will be elected by the TDF members (formally named Board of Trustees) using STV method (so we can use the same method as for BoD elections)

- Number of MC members will be a minimum of three and a maximum of 10% of the number of TDF members and needs to be an odd number (means we are quite flexible here but BoD needs to decide about the certain number)

- MC represents the Foundation judicial and extrajudicial against the members of the board (in case of conflict) and processes appeals from the members to the BoD (means it is responsible for processing solemn address and impeachment process that are mentioned in our bylaws)

- MC will elect a chairperson among it's members. This chairperson has no special powers but the duty to confirm the minutes taken from MC decisions

There is some more legal text in the statutes but these are the main points (other MC members might correct me).

To go on with the elections, my suggestion for the would be to the same election system as we used for the BoD elections. As it was very helpfull to have Simon as Election Secretary, BoD should also name one for the MC elections (looking for volunteers here).

BoD needs also to vote on the number of MC members. Current MC suggests to have 5 members (plus 2 deputies if we have enough candidates).

A suggested timeline then might be:

-20 04.11.11 Announce elections
                   prepare infrastructure
                   document election process details ...
-15 09.11.11 freeze membership process (or take snapshot that
                   defines eligible members)
-14 10.11.11 start nomination,
                   Introduction / discussion with nominees ...
-3 21.11.11 publish final list of nominees
                   Introduction / discussion with nominees ...
0 24.11.11 Start of elections
                   elections running
7 01.12.11 elections closed
                   counting votes,
9 03.12.11 publish result
                   time to appeal
12 06.12.11 publish final result

We had some discussion, if we should freeze again the membership process. BoD should decide on that (I personally would not like to have again some weeks where we do not accept new members, at the other hand it might be easy to challenge the vote, if we don't freeze.)

In any case the MC should have a spezial meeting to process applications one or two days before the date when the process is frozen (or snapshot is taken).

This scedule is still very late, if we want to do the inauguration with an elected MC. Anyway .. I don't see, how we could speed up this process and still keep it fair for all of our members.

best regards,

André