创建社区治理的THATCamp

(Parenthetical clarification of parens (because I heard you like ()s in your ()小号) — I’m not a founder, but was happy to contribute thoughts on the draft)

There might need to be some clarification about the bullets about posting agenda one week in advance, and members being able to call a vote at any time, and chair being responsible for making every effort to get all members present.

If someone calls for a vote on an issue, that seems to imply a call for a meeting at which to vote. In that case, the chair has to post the agenda a week in advance, so calling for the vote really means calling for a meeting, and the absolute soonest time a vote could happen is one week after that person calls for the meeting.

Unless, that is, Council members can vote on things without there being a meeting. I’m wildly not in favor of that, but if that’s what we’re looking at it needs to be spelled out, with clear rules what the difference is, circumstances where non-meeting votes are or are not appropriate, notification times and mechanisms for non-meeting voting, and probably more. (Did I mention I’m not in favor of that option?)

(This also hits of the voting mechanism for the Council comment above

A few other things:

* Forgot who mentioned this, but does the Council nominate replacements, or can nominations come from anyone in the THATCamp community? I prefer coming from anyone, as the 7 members could easily miss emerging THATCamp leadership, given how many THATCamps are going on. In that case, would it be the responsibility of the chair, or of the outgoing Council as a whole, to do things like confirm eligibility and that they accept the nomination?

* I’m hesitant about a Council member being automatically removed if they miss 2 consecutive scheduled meetings. Say meeting 1 takes place, and member A cannot attend. 然后, would the chair have a special responsibility to make sure the next meeting is scheduled at a time that member A can attend, even at the expense of greater meeting attendance? Shenanigans potential for a Chair to boot someone off by scheduling two meetings when one person can’t attend. Not collegial, and such a chair should certainly be booted subsequently, but still, the mechanisms seem to allow for that. Speaking of which, whatever the removal mechanism(小号) might be…..

* What to do with midterm vacant seats (either by booting or by retirement, whatever)? I’d say mostly like regular elections, but seat must be filled within 1 month of the seat becoming vacant. If it’s the chair who leaves/gets booted, same thing, but upon election within 1 week the Council meets to choose its new chair

* Is there something about how soon after election the Council has its first meeting? I’d say 1 周, as it’s the shortest notice for a meeting, though that could make scheduling an issue as, really everyone should be at the first meeting. Outgoing chair would schedule that.

* Hopefully last thing — if the Chair casts a tie-breaking vote, does the Chair usually vote? that is, does the chair only vote in the event of a tie, or does the chair vote on everything, but their vote counts double when there is a tie?

夏! Changes look very happy!

On some of the new stuff:

In the “First Council” section,the doc currently says that the election of March 2015 将 “replace Drs French, 注FELDT, and Murray-John”. That sounds like we’d be automatically off the council, which isn’t what I _think_ the intent is. Maybe nothing need be said, since it’s clear that our terms are 1 年?

Regarding ties (没有, this isn’t about a dress code):

Currently the language is:

In the event of a tie for the last open seat, 决选将追平候选人之间举行.

I love the partial bloc approach for the election, but the possible scenarios for runoff get weird if they are also partial-bloc. And also if they aren’t. It looks possible, 例如, for there to be 1 clear winner for the 4 seats open in the first election, and any number of people tied for 3 remaining seats (或 2 clear winners and any number for the remaining 2), so the “last open seat” isn’t the only possibility? I’d imagine that we’ll have enough voters to make that possibility vanishingly small, but it’s a potential bug.

In that case, continuing partial bloc voting for runoff might work, but still runs the possibility, albeit slim, of endless inconclusive runoffs — no white smoke for you! So we still need a cutoff to the runoffs.

和 “last open seat” case doesn’t work in partial bloc, since everyone gets N-1 votes for the N=1 open seat. So this is the easy case — just need to specify that in this case it’s not partial bloc anymore, it majority wins, again with some mechanism for cutting off the runoffs.

The possible permutations get weird for 4 开席. A couple examples, assuming only the minimum 7 候选人.

* 1 clear winner. 6 other people all have the same number of votes
* 2 top winners. 5 other people with equal votes
* 2 top winners, 2 “second place” winners with equal votes, 3 others with clear winners for the “remaining” 2 seats

Again, not likely situations, but possible.

所以, starting with partial bloc, we’re looking at what to do with edge cases, what edge cases we need to explicitly anticipate, and when to say it punts out to the outgoing council to sort out the hanging chads.

There’s also the bit about putting in the charter how RRCHNM will choose the RRCHNM appointment, regardless of the question of multiple people connected to the Center on the Council.

Seems like the THATCamp charter shouldn’t tell the separate RRCHNM how to do it’s thing? Maybe just

RRCHNM will appoint its representative, through a process that RRCHNM deems fit

or somesuch thing. That is, if the Director wants to decide, or if Director wants to raise the question at a meeting of some sort, or if it’s a free-for-all, or whatever — I don’t think the THATCamp charter can define any process for the RRCHNM representative appointment. It just has to have an agreement that RRCHNM will find a representative somehow, to their taste.