Re: Vote NO on referendum to reduce board members

[Ross Golder <ross golder org>]

On จ., 2005-10-24 at 14:26 -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:
> On 10/24/05, Elijah Newren <newren gmail com> wrote:
> > On 10/24/05, Fernando San Martín Woerner <snmartin galilea cl> wrote:
> > > El lun, 24-10-2005 a las 22:01 +0200, Olav Vitters escribió:
> > > > On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 09:22:17PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> >
> > > > > So vote for members who do things. If you have less members and they
> > > > > then turn out not to do anything will be better or worse
> > > >
> > > > With less members they will be forced to step down. That is my
> > > > intention. After each year I want to see what each board member has
> > > > accomplished.
> > >
> > > i guess that you can do it now.
> >
> > Actually, no you can't.  Perhaps there are those who know how much
> > each board member has done but quite honestly, I have no clue.  And
> > short of manually pinging all of them and trying to extract the
> > information from them not only about themselves but the others on the
> > board (which I suspect would be a fairly time consuming task), I don't
> > really have any clue how I would find out.  And if I don't know, you
> > can bet there are a ton of other people out there who don't either.
> 
> Oops, I guess I could read the occasional meeting minutes sent out by
> Daniel; I forgot about that when I wrote the above (yeah, I'm a
> slacker and haven't been reading them very closely).  But reading
> through all of them and tracking who is doing how much from all of
> that also sounds like more work than I'd expect each member of the
> foundation to do (and in particular, I'm not going to spend the time
> on that even if I'd love to read a summary put together by someone
> else...)
> 

I was going to say something along those lines. I do read the minutes
each time (briefly scan through it anyway), but I couldn't honestly say
that, at voting time I could recall everything I've read in them and
apply a value to each nominee based on their achievements/work done in
the last period. That would also count against nominees that didn't
serve in the last period, who may turn out to be more of an asset in the
upcoming period that the old ones.

I also don't know a great deal about how the board works in practice,
and how the meetings go, so I don't really feel qualified to cast a yes
or no vote. I bet an OGG recording of the teleconference calls and
meetings would be more interesting/informative (+entertaining!) than the
written minutes! :)

My gut feeling at the moment, is that 11 people may be a good number for
a football team, but if half of the players are distracted from the game
due to external factors, are bickering with each other, or are only in
it for personal gain/glory, they'll easily get trounced by a more
nimble, focused 5-a-side (or 7-a-side or whatever) team. Probably a bad
analogy, but that sums up my feeling at the moment. Basically, it seems
there is adequate concern that some players aren't really 'doing their
bit'. It shouldn't have to come to this just to get decisions made,
surely!

Just my 2 million dong,

--
Ross