Hi MJ, Bdale, and everyone else who's commented, On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 06:44:56PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote: > Bdale Garbee <bd...@gag.com> wrote: > > > That's not a bad idea, but honestly, given the outcome of the recent > > vote, I too believe that just calling for the same vote again with the > > call for votes making it VERY clear that there are significant quorum > > issues with the existing bylaws that make it very important that > > EVERYONE take time to vote, would likely yield the desired outcome in > > one step. > > I suspect voter fatigue and feeling that the board was treating the > result with contempt may make that not so. It's considered a bad sign to > just keep repeating a vote unchanged because one doesn't like the > result, as the UK Prime Minister has discovered to her cost!
I agree that voter fatigue would make it problematic to do a rerun right now, especially since we're about to do the annual director elections in July. There's only so frequently we can responsibly ask members to vote, even on different topics; that's doubly true when we just asked them about one of the topics mere weeks ago, and triply true when a last-minute bylaws approval would need us to rush to classify the expiration timelines of different director seats very quickly before the annual election. But that said, the bylaws that were proposed are the result of three robust rounds of member feedback on this very list, and 125 out of 129 votes were in favor, so I really do think that a bit of extra encouragement and information along the lines of what Bdale said might be the right choice. While I'm happy to try to address your current concerns, I think we resolved most member concerns by incorporating the comments from those three rounds of member feedack. I really do think that it's simply inattention or unfamiliarity that led to the vote failure, not primarily disagreement, unlike the UK Prime Minister's situation. While a possible re-attempt may well not be appropriate during May or June, it might be worthwhile soon after the upcoming election plus one more round of inactive member cleanup. We waited rather a large number of months between the last cleanup and the stat of the bylaws vote, which may have led to additional inactivity. Not the best strategy on our part. > I feel it would be better if the call for votes was accompanied with a > better justification for wholesale replacement than the old rules "do > not meet the current practical operational needs of SPI" yet something > more succinct than a cited-but-not-linked 10 page FAQ which, frankly, I > found unstructured and confusing - who asked those questions frequently? Unfortunately the term "Frequently Asked Questions" has long lost its literal definition in English - I agree that's a bit weird but it's what I've observed in many areas. Otherwise, no brand-new launch of anything would ever have an accompanying document labeled as a FAQ before there was time for questions to be asked frequently, but launches frequently have accompanying FAQs. All the feedback we've gotten on this FAQ before your email has been quite positive, but that doesn't invalidate your opinion; I do agree that it's not wonderfully structured. That said, many of the questions asked in your email (and answered in mine) are already addressed in the FAQ, so it does have relevant content. The link issue is unfortunate. The Secretary intended to convert his HTML URLs to links, but the voting system prevented him from making that edit when he tried since the system had already begun accepting votes. > Confusing also because the FAQ says "The board is primarily trying to > update the bylaws to match actual practice, not to govern SPI > differently" which seems to contradict the "do not meet the current > practical operational needs" justification for a clean-slate rewrite. That's a very strong justification in my mind: the law expects us to comply with our bylaws, and in theory a court case could arise from non-compliance. That makes it worth converging our bylaws and our practice; adopting the model in our current bylaws does not work well for SPI's current needs, so amending the bylaws is appropriate. The level of necessary amendments do, unfortunately, amount to roughly a clean-slate replacement in any phrasing; if we had started from the old document, the resulting diff would have been rather unwieldy in size and legibility. I admit the practical risk of a lawsuit on this issue is low, but that just explains why we allowed ourselves to take years to get to the point of finishing a draft that meets legal and member needs and holding the vote; it is not a reason to keep the badly suited bylaws indefinitely. > There seems to be no changelog from the original draft, nor any > commentary/comparison with the current rules. There are "most > noteworthy changes" in the FAQ but who knows if I agree with the > anonymous FAQ author? The FAQ author is the board - mostly me individually but with a few tweaks by others. The section on the most noteworthy changes is meant to serve the purpose of a changelog. Yes, it's not the same thing as a diff, which is pretty routine for a changelog. The wording about "most noteworthy changes" and encouraging everyone to read the draft was simply in case I forgot to mention something important in my summary. But I didn't intentionally hide anything, of course; that was just cautious communication. If you wonder why we started with a new document: when Bdale started the process in 2016 together with our legal counsel at Software Freedom Law Center, in the interest of a legally compliant end result that meets our needs, that's how SFLC was most productively able to help us. We started with a draft they provided and iterated from there. There wasn't anything particularly valuable about the old document, and quite a lot that was unhelpful for how SPI operates. > I doubt I'm the only SPI member who felt uninformed and without time > across the end of the tax year to become properly informed, so I cast > no vote. Probably not. Good point that this overlapped with tax season for many people. I had originally hoped for the vote to take place in September last year, but it took a while to work through technical and logistical issues with the voting system and with direct member notification emails. - Jimmy Kaplowitz ji...@spi-inc.org _______________________________________________ Spi-general mailing list Spi-general@lists.spi-inc.org http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general
