"Chrissy Fullam" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Mon, 01 Oct 2007 07:33:54 -0700:
> Flameeyes did send an email, that vapier resent for those who didn't get > it, where flameeyes agreed that jokey would be his proxy while he > focused on getting better and getting back to Gentoo work. I didn't see that; maybe it ended up on core? I had been wondering about that myself, but figured I'd find out eventually. > In the past we have had Council members leave and be replaced, though I > don't see the policy for that. Perhaps that should be included in the > discussion of what to do when a Council member, even if they have a > proxy, is away for an extended period or undetermined period of time. I had thought the resign/leave/whatever procedure was well laid out -- the person next in elective order (the one that "just missed", so to speak) got the spot. There had been some debate as to a cutoff, since (assuming a reasonably larger group of candidates than spots) at some point the ranking can be said to be voting /against/ a particular candidate, likely by the last one, anyway, but to my knowledge nothing ever came of said discussion, and it continues down the list in order to the last candidate, if necessary. The question here was that nobody knew how long he'd be out, or whether he intended trying to participate from his hospital bed if necessary. Events had moved fast enough that I don't believe a proxy had been declared initially, but luckily, it would seem Flameeyes was at least able to take care of that. Re the larger question, I see two possibilities, should someone either simply disappear, or as in this case, be suddenly but temporarily incapacitated. (1) Extend the above mechanism a bit further to specifically include such "temporary" activation. (2) Have council candidates declare a proxy as they are running. For those familiar with it, this would be similar to the US Vice President's position, only at a legislative as opposed to executive level. The current problem with (1) is that lacking the explicitly documented temporary procedure, it could look like an effort to permanently depose the council member, and at least in theory, there'd be a question of who's the legitimate council member when the disabled member returns due to there being no documented procedure for a temporary replacement if a proxy wasn't declared. The problem with (2) is twofold, one current/temporary, one longer term. The temporary/trivial issue is that such wasn't done this time, so if we go that way, we simply have to get every member's proxy declaration on record. The longer term issue is that it then sort of conflicts with the above permanent replacement mechanism. Arguably, if the two effectively ran as a team from the beginning, then the current permanent replacement mechanism is no longer needed except as an ultimate fallback in case the "VP" is taken out of commission without a new one yet being declared. There's also the practical matter of then deciding whether a "VP" candidate can also be running on their own and if they get elected too, what then? Take /their/ VP? Move to the fallback in-elected-order replacement? One simple way to handle it would be to do away with the declared proxy thing entirely, and simply make it a policy that the next two (or whatever value of X) runners-up on the council list should be present at every meeting as well. They'd be able to take place in pre-vote discussion, but their votes wouldn't count unless one of the full members was missing. That way, it wouldn't matter why, and there'd be a single replacement mechanism for both temporary and permanent replacement. The biggest difference vs. the existing system would be that a member chosen proxy is more likely to share their views than the next runner-up, but it would eliminate what in effect is two different mechanisms now, replacing the temporary proxy mechanism with a more consistent mechanism that works the same regardless of whether it's temporary or permanent. The general effect would be that if a council member knew their views differed from the runner-up in an area to be discussed, there'd be stronger motivation to make it to the meeting. =8^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
