[OpenID board] Membership (or lack thereof) and Board Elections

Drummond Reed drummond.reed at cordance.net
Fri Feb 29 06:55:56 UTC 2008


David has a good point that having community board elections before we have
enrolled a reasonable number of community members seems backward. Maybe we
should set a target number of community members (50? 100?) after which we
trigger elections?

I also think as I said on the call today that a dramatically lower community
membership fee ($20 or less) would help encourage community membership.

=Drummond 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: board-bounces at openid.net [mailto:board-bounces at openid.net] On Behalf
> Of David Recordon
> Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 10:39 PM
> To: board at openid.net
> Subject: [OpenID board] Membership (or lack thereof) and Board Elections
> 
> Stemming from other conversations...I'd have to agree that so far
> we've really done very little to push for membership in the OpenID
> Foundation.  Today the benefits are around electing the Foundation's
> board and approving specification working groups, though they're not
> articulated anywhere nor have we actually built the applications to
> make these benefits a reality!
> 
> I also think that the local chapters of the OpenID Foundation will (or
> at least should) weigh somehow on community board elections.  The
> community board should be balanced to represent OpenID communities
> around the World and finding a way to have local chapters help achieve
> this feels imperative.
> 
> I want to start out by saying that I completely agree that we need to
> hold elections for the community board seats so that they are
> officially elected by the community!  That said, I am truly worried
> that the OpenID Foundation's membership is not actually in a position
> to do that yet.  Rather, it seems that as we still are not focusing on
> building the membership base, even if we hold elections in April/May
> (Mike's policy document was awesome btw) *the outcome still won't
> represent the community*.  In fact, we might be in a worse position
> where 20 members elect the board members for one or two years which is
> then seen as being representative of the community.  While it can be
> argued that even 20 members electing the community board is better
> than 0 members electing it, I'd much rather see us in a situation
> where even if it is another six months down the road we have 500
> members electing the board!
> 
> Right now, the OpenID ecosystem is moving and growing faster than the
> Foundation or its board!  I would strongly advocate that we focus our
> energy today on making the Foundation match the growing community (as
> we did yesterday in Japan) before locking down the board for another
> two years; nearly the entire lifespan of OpenID itself.
> 
> My $0.02,
> --David
> 
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