[OpenID board] URGENT: New Board members motion

Drummond Reed drummond.reed at cordance.net
Tue Nov 4 20:14:02 UTC 2008


I am totally in favor of any nomination process for community board members
that will reach the maximum audience and produce the maximum participation.
I don't know what the specifics are on the nomination process as supported
by the new election tools that Mike referred to - if they can do the full
job, that's great.

 

RE holding an election, I strongly agree that we should announce an election
as one of the principal drivers for a membership drive. I see no reason not
to decide on this at next Monday's board meeting, announce it at IIW, and
schedule the election for no more than 30 days out after IIW. We could
announce that the election will be complete by mid-December and the new
board will be seated starting Jan. 1 2009. Fresh slate for a new year.

 

Also IMHO of this should slow down acceptance of new corporate board members
- we should take action on that ASAP.

 

=Drummond 

 

  _____  

From: board-bounces at openid.net [mailto:board-bounces at openid.net] On Behalf
Of DeWitt Clinton
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 11:46 AM
To: board at openid.net
Subject: Re: [OpenID board] URGENT: New Board members motion

 

To be clear, I'm very comfortable adding new corporate members.  I voted
with the consensus on that one.

-DeWitt

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 11:42 AM, Dick Hardt <dick.hardt at gmail.com> wrote:

I understand the logic of not self-selecting community board seats -- and
saying we are going to have an election in a few weeks likely will drive
membership given the recent OpenID awareness.

 

I don't understand why you are uncomfortable adding new corporate board
members. Would you elaborate?

 

-- Dick

 

On 4-Nov-08, at 12:21 PM, DeWitt Clinton wrote:





I remain uncomfortable adding any new board members, corporate or otherwise,
until we hold the election.

Admittedly, back around Feb/March this year I was vocal about wanting us to
have a larger membership base before holding elections.  A membership drive
was one way to do that.  Another was my suggestion to drop membership fees.

But now I'm reversing my earlier position.  (Had I known the election would
be pushed all the way into 2009 waiting for a membership drive, then I
wouldn't have taken that position to begin with.)  

So I recommend we just go ahead and hold the election now.  Worst case, we
have a board that represents a smaller membership than we'd like.  I'd still
prefer that over self-selecting new community board members.

-DeWitt

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 10:52 AM, Dick Hardt <dick.hardt at gmail.com> wrote:

It will be a while before we can have a real election.

 

We agreed we would finish our messaging so that we could then market to the
membership so that it is clear the value of membership. Then we can have
nominations, then we can vote. 

 

We are still a little ways from having the messaging done. A marketing drive
and nomination process likely will take a couple weeks each at least. We are
minimum a couple months from having an election unfortunately.

 

-- Dick

 

On 4-Nov-08, at 11:09 AM, DeWitt Clinton wrote:





Rather than do it this way, why don't we simply start an open nomination
process (i.e., not nominations made by the board) and schedule a real
community election, as voted in by the members?

-DeWitt



On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 10:04 AM, Drummond Reed <drummond.reed at cordance.net>
wrote:

+1 to Snorri's nomination - his work speaks for itself.

 

=Drummond 

 

  _____  

From: board-bounces at openid.net [mailto:board-bounces at openid.net] On Behalf
Of David Recordon
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 9:42 AM
To: board at openid.net
Subject: Re: [OpenID board] URGENT: New Board members motion

 

If we're in nomination mode, then I'd also like to nominate Snorri to join
as a community board member (if he is willing to accept that nomination).
Snorri has done amazing community work internationally which should be
directly supported by the Foundation.

 

On Nov 4, 2008, at 11:38 AM, Drummond Reed wrote:

 

+1 to all Brian's points here. I want to clarify again that my objection
last week was not to moving forward on this - I am very supportive of adding
additional corporate board members immediately -- it was only to the
difficulty of closing what turned out to be a contentious issue via an email
vote.

 

I am all for holding a vote this week if we want to call a meeting. Worst
case we could hold the vote at the BOD meeting next Monday afternoon at IIW.
(Have we set an exact time/location for that meeting? Will there be dial-in
so all board members can participate if they are not at IIW in person?)

 

Also, in terms of community board members, I would like to nominate Brian
Kissel to join as a community board member (if he is willing to accept that
nomination). I'd move for that vote to be held at the same time so he could
join the board at the same time as the new corporate board members.

 

=Drummond

 

  _____  

From: board-bounces at openid.net [mailto:board-bounces at openid.net] On Behalf
Of Brian Kissel
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2008 4:47 PM
To: board at openid.net
Subject: Re: [OpenID board] URGENT: New Board members motion

 

+1 with Dick on additional corporate members.  I've had conversations with
BBC (Zac Bjelogrlic, Dirk-willem Van.gulik ) and PayPal (Andrew Nash) and
know that both organizations would both like to join.  I don't know who else
in on the list of possible new members, but if we have up to 5 corporate
spots to fill and these two firms are willing to make a commitment of time
and dollars, I think we should not delay. 

 

BBC has already shown their leadership by hosting the Content Provider
Advisory Committee meeting in NYC several weeks ago.  They've also OpenID
enabled RadioPop and are looking at additional properties to roll out.
They've offered to work with NPR (who was also at the NYC session) to see if
we can get BBC, NPR, PBS, and CBC to collaborate on OpenID enablement
initiatives.  And in any case, we need some large representative RPs on the
BOD.  As I've said before, I think media companies are a next logical
adopter of OpenID, so would welcome BBC's membership. 

 

PayPal would also be great because they have a lot of experience in managing
phishing and general security infrastructure and represent the perspective
of merchants and payment infrastructure providers, which we need represented
on the BOD if we want to continue to expand the applicability and value of
OpenID beyond user generated content access.

 

I don't know if these are the companies we're thinking about voting on near
term, but if so, I would strongly endorse their membership.  I also agree
with Dick that getting the funding commitment from these two companies in
uncertain financial times is critical and will actually help with hiring the
new ED and coming up with a reasonable budget for the various initiatives
we'll want to undertake in 2009.  For those that didn't see Nat Sakimura's
announcement about OpenID Japan
<http://openid.net/2008/11/03/openid-japan-launches-with-32-member-companies
/> , they are making great progress and we need to have equally compelling
aspirations.

 

With respect to community membership, JanRain would certainly welcome the
opportunity to contribute as a BOD member, but we'll continue to participate
via my membership on the Marketing and Customer Research Committee
regardless.


We are working with Research Media to get the OpenID membership polling
solution working this week and the BOD election system working next week.
Regardless of that, I don't think we should wait on the BOD vote the two
additional corporate members.

 

There is a lot of good buzz going on right now with the Microsoft and Google
announcements.  If we could also announce these two new corporate BOD
members at IIW, that we can continue to build on that momentum.

 

So, IMHO, we should do the vote on the 2 additional corporate sponsors right
now (assuming they are still willing) and finalize them this week.  If we
want to wait on community members, that's fine with me.

 

Cheers,


Brian

==============

Brian Kissel

Cell: 503.866.4424

Fax: 503.296.5502

 

From: board-bounces at openid.net [mailto:board-bounces at openid.net] On Behalf
Of Dick Hardt
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2008 3:54 PM
To: board at openid.net
Subject: Re: [OpenID board] URGENT: New Board members motion

 

I don't see any advantage to the coupling of hiring an ED and bringing on
new board members. Any ED is going to look at the risk of getting paid.
Bringing in money before hand is a good sign. In the current economic
climate, making a donation to a Foundation is going to come under increased
scrutiny.

 

The bylaws allow the board to appoint temporary community board members as
need be -- something we would want to do in case someone needs to resign for
some reason.

 

Only bringing on corporate members one at elections does not serve us well.
We have a product, which is membership, and we should remove barriers to
selling it rather then raising it -- and requiring the timing to coincide
with an election does not serve anyone well -- except those that want to
make board membership exclusive.

 

We have been working on having elections since last March.

 

As noted in my financial report, not bringing these corporate members on
board was a bad financial decision.

 

-- Dick

 

On 24-Oct-08, at 6:49 PM, DeWitt Clinton wrote:

 

Sort of.  I think we should have finished the discussion about how to
proceed with a full five new corporate board members, timed that around the
hiring of the new ED, and ideally scheduled all of it around the election of
new community members.  With those three pieces in place we then could make
a coordinated engagement on all three.  Four pieces, in fact, as we can
count the CRC in there as well.

I share your frustration, Dick, and I agree that sometimes a vote makes a
good forcing function.  It's taken far too long to get where we are, and I
happen to concur that those were fine nominees.  And I especially welcome
Brian's continued leadership in any case.

Hopefully this is the kick in the pants we need to close in expediently on
the missing pieces.  And then I'd welcome seeing this come up for a vote
again in the near future.

Cheers,

-DeWitt

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 5:33 PM, Dick Hardt <dick.hardt at gmail.com> wrote:

Do you have a suggestion on how this should have been done differently by
me?

 

I made the motion on the board call and agreed to withdraw it until after
the membership committee report was published, and then we could do the vote
over email. Agreed that the vote should have been started on the public list
-- but we are here now.

 

Do you have a new motion to bring the nominees on the board that you would
support that we could act upon?

 

-- Dick

 

 

On 24-Oct-08, at 5:17 PM, DeWitt Clinton wrote:

 

This is not a vote against any of the nominees, but procedurally and
organizationally we can do better than this.  Hence to the motion as it
stands at this time:

-1

-DeWitt

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:03 PM, Raj Mata <rajmata at yahoo-inc.com> wrote:

-1.

Agree with Gary.

Raj


-----Original Message-----
From: board-bounces at openid.net [mailto:board-bounces at openid.net] On

Behalf Of Krall, Gary
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2008 12:42 PM
To: board at openid.net

Subject: Re: [OpenID board] URGENT: New Board members motion

-1.

As we are actively in the process of recruiting for a Executive Director
which my understanding is should complete shortly coupled; with the
manner in which this vote has been requested/handled is a clear
indication to me that adding any additional members at this time would
not be prudent.

Gary.

-----Original Message-----
From: board-bounces at openid.net [mailto:board-bounces at openid.net]On
Behalf Of Dick Hardt
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2008 9:48 AM
To: board at openid.net
Subject: [OpenID board] URGENT: New Board members motion
Importance: High


(this motion was originally posted on the board-private list to
protect the confidentiality of the potential corporate board members
-- reposting to public list to provide transparency to community)

Background:

There are two corporations that have expressed interest in joining the
OpenID Foundation for the last six months. The board approved adding 5
new corporate board seats, to be balanced with community seats so that
the community seats have a majority.
Brian Kissel has been active on the marketing committee and the
customer research committee. He organized a gathering of content
providers in NY that led to the OpoenID UX summit last Monday.
The primary source of funding for the Foundation is corporate board
seats. In order to fund a new Executive Director and OpenID adoption
initiatives, we need more funding. The patience of the two
corporations is running thin as they have been waiting for far to long
for a decision from the board.

The motion: Add the two corporate board seats and add Brian Kissel as
the community seat. Brian's seat (like all other community board
seats) would be up for re-election when we hold an election.

All board members need to vote or abstain for the motion to be
considered.

Votes to date:

+1 Dick Hardt (made motion)
+1 Martin Atkins (seconded motion)
-1 David Recordon
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