[maemo-community] Draft Bylaws for Maemo Non-Profit Entity

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On 10 July 2012 17:06, robert bauer <nybauer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Perhaps the section of most interest and discussion will be Membership and
> Governance.  It is suggested that we keep the present "open" nature of the
> maemo community to the extent practical.

Why does HF need "membership"? It doesn't seem related to who can vote
the Board in.

Perhaps it would be useful to have a wiki page or something where you
describe the "vision" underlying these Bylaws, and so what they're
trying to support.

> Council discussed a prior draft of the bylaws at its July 6 meeting and you
> may refer to the logs for that discussion.  Please don't take offense if an
> issue important to you has not been mentioned in this mail - please raise it
> and discuss it as you wish.

On the voting section/changes, there's a clause:

> [...] except the requirement that software must be freely available under
> an open source license as defined by the Open Software Foundation.

AFAICS, this is the first reference to this "requirement".

However, on the whole, it looks like a good start. There seem to be
some gaps which the Community Council Election process covers, though:

> The initial Board shall determine the voting criteria
> for community members eligible to select subsequent Board Directors.

If this is in the Bylaws, doesn't it allow each Board to select how
the next Board is selected? Seems sloppy. Make it STV and counted like
the Council. Similarly there should be clauses in the Bylaws about
what happens if there aren't enough members to stand.

STV makes sense if people are running for a pool place, but should the
Board have defined roles which are elected to?

Cheers,

Andrew

PS. Are you sure "Hildon" isn't trademarked by Nokia?

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/