The issue of figuring out who is the electoral body is a messy one and I don't think there is a perfect answer. Upon considering it, here is my proposal for the first electorate (to vote on Sept 25):
- All users who have posted in the past three months are eligible
- All CVS committers are eligible
I believe that the group should be open as possible for this first election. This will be the inaugral "OpenACS citizenry". I don't think that we will see a lot abuse here since we have a fairly tight group of people who pay attention to the boards. Also, since there's been relative quiet in threads regarding governance, I don't suspect we will have to worry about any "vast conspiracy" to undermine the general feeling about governance in the community.
The incentive to join the first vote will be eligibility to participate in the next vote. This original group will also be empowered to vote on new additions to the "citizenry".
Does that make sense?
Personally, I don't like the idea of requiring sponsorship of a current OCT member to run for election. I don't quite understand the logic behind that. Presumably it's so that OCT members can choose people they would like to work with.
But what if we want to elect new members of the OCT because the current members are behaving with cronyism? Wouldn't the requirement that to run for the OCT you need to be friends with the current board bar any kind of radical new blood?
I think it would be a real shame if a big time web database community didn't use it's own survey and polling tools to conduct its critical voting procedures. Someone's already written a number of tcl scripts for conducting votes, here is the link. Perhaps they can be adapted for use in the OACS context?
(Actually, ElectionMethods.org is itself an interesting read regarding this subject.)
As far as the maximum number from one organization/company/institution... I think that's a toughie. I like Joel's idea of a certain percentage. Or perhaps 2. it's a bit hard because there is a lot of overlap among clients, companies and organizations. I don't quite know the answer to this one...
talli
