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

[Krall, Gary]

David:

These are *excellent* comments and ones which I share.  As you can see from my posts it appears that actual membership is overstated and if an election would happen it could be a voting by a extremely small group that would not necessarily be represented of the larger community.

The view during that call was that we could use the upcoming board elections as a way to drive membership. Personally I am not convinced that would motivate new members (unless they had their own agenda) as the organization to them is relatively new and not enough time has elapsed from the time of their joining to board elections for serious contemplation and consideration of the proposed candidates.

All that being said, there seemed to be a linkage between the formation of working groups and the election of board officers.  It was due to this linkage that we went from Mike's estimate of an "early summer" election to something that needed to happen much sooner.  Perhaps we need to revisit this linkage on list to understand it a bit better.

Gary.

-----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

_______________________________________________
board mailing list
board at openid.net
http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/board