[maemo-community] Election process referendum

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Tuesday 03 February 2009 19:41:29 Ryan Abel wrote:
> As Dave says, this isn't the reality right now, but it could be a very
> real one down the road. The Council is likely going to end up handling
> both a significant amount of money and dealing very directly with
> hirings and firings. Because of this, we need safeguards in place
> _now_ to prevent fraud from taking place in the future.

Sorry.  I don't buy that.  If/when that happens, the issue will not be the 
election process (that is practically irrelevant) but the process for 
handling that money.  Whoever is elected will have to have constraints and 
supporting processes!

If there is money and jobs involved then there have to be much stronger legal 
structures involved: accounts, treasurers, minutes of council meetings, dual 
signatories, voting rules for the council, grievance processes, etc, etc.  
Whoever is in charge of that money and those jobs can end up in a court and 
needs more than the current constitution to protect them.  Just look at the 
constitution of a local sports club, for example.

I presume that in the short term, the council will actually be offering 
advice, presumably to Nokia.  Nokia will have legal responsibility and would 
be the entity ending up in court.  In that case, we are back to the situation 
where no one is going to want to bother to fix the election because Nokia is 
not going to follow advice to "fire Dave because I don't like him" 
or "transfer all the money to my friend Ryan".

Requiring voters to create an account on maemo.org seems like quite enough of 
a safeguard.

Graham