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

Wed Jul 11 18:57:46 EEST 2012

On 11 July 2012 15:57, robert bauer <nybauer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Andrew Flegg <andrew at bleb.org> wrote:
>>
>> Why does HF need "membership"? It doesn't seem related to who can vote
>> the Board in.
>
> It is related.  The subsequents Boards are selected by a vote of HF
> community members.

OK, makes sense. Should some definition of "member" be included, even
if it's "a minimum requirement for membership is an account on the
community website".

>> 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.
>
> The vision is to keep the governance similar to maemo.org, while complying
> with the necessary legalities for an NPE.

Right, but some might find it hard without "showing your working".

>> > [...] 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".
>
> It's the last one in the Functions section.  Perhaps it's not clear that it
> is a "requirement" and so that could be clarified.  Should it be clarified
> in Functions or should it be made part of the Mission?

Ah, I see. I'd parsed it as being related to the software powering the
website and the discussions around whether vBulletin (closed source)
should continue to be used.

Perhaps some definition of "software" would be useful, even if it's
just as a proper noun which is referred back to here.

> I think we should allow for the possibility to have someone from Nokia or
> Jolla be on the Board even if they don't have 100 karma under current system.
> Rather than try to decide this in advance, the proposal is to select the very
> first Board according to present criteria and then they can decide what will
> work best after seeing how the organization shapes up.

Hmm, but those are the very core questions which'll affect how the
Foundation operates! I appreciate "suck it and see" is going to be
sensible, but if there's an option of granting board membership to
people from related organisations that should be specifically included
as a debatable option.

Perhaps as a provision for up to 3 (non-executive?) board members at
the discretion of the elected board? Although this overlaps with the
"community positions".

>> STV makes sense if people are running for a pool place, but should the
>> Board have defined roles which are elected to?
>
> We're trying not to make assumptions in case the NPE does not have the
> infrastructure to do karma or STV.

Karma, I understand. But the infrastructure to run the voting software
or calculate the results using STV is trivial. It's all standard open
source stuff, with no dependency on the rest of the maemo.org
infrastructure (e.g. Midgard or the Garage databases).

As has been seen in previous elections, people can take the raw
output, run it through the same software package and come up with
"exit poll" results.

>> PS. Are you sure "Hildon" isn't trademarked by Nokia?
>
> I am sure it is not in the US.  Of course, we may not use Hildon at all in
> the future.

Fair enough. I think ideally it'd be possible to come up with a new
name (as "Mer", "Nemo Mobile" and "Jolla" have done); but perhaps we
don't need that on top of the rest of the work ;-)

On the transparency front, I think the bylaws could be bumped up in
various areas - meeting minutes published, finances/annual report
public etc.

HTH,

Andrew

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