[OpenID board] Getting Membership Management Under Control

[Eddy Nigg (StartCom Ltd.)]

On 06/03/2009 08:07 PM, DeWitt Clinton:
> Well, there's a lot of history there.  I was directly involved in 
> bringing Google to the OIDF, and I felt strongly about the importance 
> of OpenID to the web, so at the time I was a natural fit to represent 
> Google on the board.  But it was outside my day to day 
> responsibilities at Google -- I did it more as an individual that 
> happened to be filling a corporate seat sponsored by Google.
>
> Eric, on the other hand, was thinking about and working on these types 
> of things full time for his job at Google, and he was making quite an 
> impression on the community in the process, so he not surprisingly was 
> elected to hold a community seat when we held the elections.   After a 
> certain point it was clear to everyone that since Eric was doing this 
> as part of his real job at Google, and I wasn't, the most natural 
> thing to do was hand the Google seat to him.
>
> I might even have run for a community seat myself, but I've been 
> focusing my spare-time energy elsewhere of late (like the Open Web 
> Foundation), and didn't want to run for a seat if I didn't think I 
> could contribute enough.
>
> If people feel strongly about this, change the bylaws to say that a 
> community seat can't be filled by an employee of a company already on 
> the board.  Though this has risks, too -- it would be a shame to lose 
> good people simply because of the signature on their paycheck.  
> Probably better to simply elect community representatives that we feel 
> are acting in the interest of the community first, and not worry so 
> much about their employer (which as we've seen with several 
> representatives already, is a temporary state anyway).

Thanks for your clarification and my memory more or less confirms this 
as well. Nevertheless I believe that there should be such a by-law for 
the benefit of everybody - including never letting such potential 
conflicts and accusations thereof happen in first place. I think it's 
simply clean governance and correct in the interest of the members 
(including sustaining members).


Regards
Signer: 	Eddy Nigg, StartCom Ltd. <http://www.startcom.org>
Jabber: 	startcom at startcom.org <xmpp:startcom at startcom.org>
Blog: 	Join the Revolution! <http://blog.startcom.org>
Phone: 	+1.213.341.0390


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