Re: [gentoo-nfp] Re: Gentoo Foundation Trustees 202106 Election Results

[Michał Górny]

On Sat, 2021-08-21 at 08:38 +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> > > > > > On Fri, 20 Aug 2021, Rich Freeman wrote:
>
> > The trustees should be attending the AGM anyway, and nobody else
> > gets
> > to vote there.  I just wanted to clarify that because the wording of
> > your statement might be taken to imply that if people show up to the
> > AGM they get some sort of voting rights.  Those voting rights were
> > already exercised in the election which just concluded.  The
> > Trustees
> > could put items up for a vote, but my reading of the bylaws suggests
> > that they couldn't do this unless 1/3rd of all members are present
> > to
> > constitute a quorum.
>
> This is one of the problems. There never was an AGM that reached the
> quorum of members. The main reason is that the quorum of 1/3 is too
> high
> (as proven by the previous sentence). I had previously suggested to
> lower it [1] but that went nowhere.
>
> Also, taking the data from [2] and from LDAP, the Foundation has 36
> members from Europe, 32 members from the Americas, 5 members from East
> Asia and Australia and 4 members with unknown location (not in LDAP).
> It is clear that there is no timezone that will fit everybody. Still,
> I
> would argue that holding the meeting at 03:00 UTC (in 2019 and 2020)
> or
> at 01:00 UTC (in 2021) which is night hours (from Sunday to Monday) in
> Europe is an unreasonable time when it excludes about half of
> Foundation
> members from several consecutive meetings.

I dare say this is somewhat a major problem with the Foundation.  You
can't expect new volunteers to take part in the proceedings if existing
members keep setting meetings in the middle of the night.

Not to mention how I felt when I actually attended the meeting
in the middle of the night, and one of the Trustees didn't -- because
apparently knowing the AGM date two months in advance is not a reason
not to plan other private activities during the time.

In the end, if not the person who didn't attend, it would be entirely
possible to find a time that would also work for us Europeans.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny