Re: 2016 SPI board elections

Hi Joshua,

On 2016-07-16 18:23, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> On 07/16/2016 06:58 AM, Philippe Cloutier wrote:
>> Greetings to all, and in particular to those I have not had the chance
>> to collaborate with yet.
>> Yesterday I became a SPI member, apparently thanks to Martin
>> Zobel-Helas, just in time for the 2016 SPI board elections, in which I
>> was able to vote.
>>
>
> Welcome!
>
>> Joshua D. Drake
>>
>> Just one comment on a specific statement, Joshua's. It contains:
>>> Getting business items in order such as proper insurance and
>>> professional services.
>>
>> What this means is vague for me (I fail to see what "business items"
>> means concretely).
>>
>
> Concretely, the corporation is not properly protected against potential hostile or negligent action. This protection usually comes in the form of Limited Liability and Director's an Officers insurance.

That is still quite abstract for me (What kind of "hostile action" are we concerned with?).

>
> [...]
>
>>
>> General
>>
>> Most statements say a lot more about what one has done than about what
>> one intends to do. There's still one easy information about who
>> candidates are which is usually missing : their age.
>>
>
> I am not sure that age is relevant but I am 43.

Thank you

> I am more interested in a candidates willingness to participate, be effective and move the corporation forward versus whether they are 22 or 65.

Me too.

Below a certain age, lack of maturity may make a candidature a lot less interesting. But in the end, it seems that all candidates in the last election had plenty of maturity. To clarify, that question only came to me when reading one specific platform. I was just suggesting this because it is trivial to include this information, not because it is particularly lacking.

>
>> I ranked candidates based on what their statements said about their
>> achievements, their goals, and my prior perception of them. Being a
>> long-time Debian developer, my ranking surely shows some bias. I was
>> hoping for commitments to transparency but did not read much on that.
>
> I would argue that transparency is implied. We are a U.S. based non-profit and the rules are pretty clear. Every member is able to attend every board meeting, all of our resolutions and financial matters are public etc...

While there is a large part of our operations which is transparent, I did not suspect that such a part was not.

From the 5 mailing lists, 3 are private. And the only private list I have access to seems to have more traffic than the public lists combined, if I trust the sample formed by the couple of weeks of presence I have. That would mean public discussions are a minority of SPI's mailing list discussions.

The contact page gives only private contact adresses for the board, the officers and the website.

The number of members is not available, nor is a list of these members, a list of members who requested to become contributing members, or the list of members whose contributing membership application was rejected.

Passive transparency would be a great start, but some basic facts should also be published. For example, I cannot see SPI's staff.

>
>>
>> Issue tracking
>>
>> The desire to properly report this presumed issue brings me to a
>> meta-issue: does SPI not have an issue tracking system?
>
> We do for reimbursements. Usually any feedback of that kind would go through the -private list. However, I could certainly see opening up a tracking system for other items, especially member concerns as a whole. That is a good idea.

Thank you very much for that (and your other answers). I have formally requested SPI to implement such a system in thread "Issue #0 - No general-purpose issue tracking system": http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2016-July/003493.html

[...]

--
Filipus Klutiero
http://www.philippecloutier.com