Elections Announcement

Hello Community,

The main part of this post is simplified to a few sentences. If you want more details, you can read the "footnotes" below.

As many of you are aware, the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors has come to be filled with all unelected Directors. [1]

There has been some significant desire to have a reelection take place once the infrastructure migration issues were settled. [2]

Those infrastructure issues are now essentially settled - we are running on our own servers (not the interim Nemein hosting), and our volunteer techstaff maintains essentially all of *maemo.org. [3]

The Hildon Foundation Council has the authority to call for the elections of both the Council and the Board of Directors, if there is unanimous agreement by all members on the Council. [4]

It is the position of this Council, that this Council was always intended to count as the Hildon Foundation Council. And thus we have the authority to trigger both elections simultaneously. [5]

Furthermore, even besides this point, a careful consideration of the Bylaws and the timings of the resignations and appointments of Directors from the Board, indicates that an election should have already been triggered by the Bylaws themselves. [6]

Having taken all of the above into consideration, we find that the desires and wellbeing of the Community is best served by us calling for the election of both the Council and the Board [7]. We have waited until the last possible moment in our term to call for this election of both bodies, to give the Board a chance to get everything done within a reasonable timeframe and then call for an election in accordance to the intended democratic spirit of our Hildon Foundation on their own.

Thus, we hereby announce the elections for both the Hildon Foundation Board and the Council.

Election nominations are now open! Please send nominations to the mailing list maemo-community@maemo.org . Do not be afraid to nominate yourself or those you think are suitable for the positions. The last time we barely scraped together enough candidates for both Council and Board.

Voting timetable:
2013-03-22:
Referendum was Announced
2013-04-09:
Nomination Period for Board/Council Begins
2013-04-22:
Referendum Contemplation Period Ends
Referendum Voting Begins
2013-04-23:
Nomination Period for Board/Council Ends
Board/Council Candidate Contemplation Period Begins
2013-04-29:
Referendum Voting Ends
2013-04-30:
Board/Council Candidate Contemplation Period Ends
Board/Council Election Voting Begins
2013-05-07:
Board/Council Election Voting Ends

- Elections Eligibility Criteria -

Eligibility criteria will likely remain the same as they have been, in as much as feasible. There is, however, a modifying circumstance: *.maemo.org account registration and login has been broken for months, until recently; furthermore, karma is /still/ broken, with a significant number of members missing a significant amouht of karma.

We will manually calculate karma for candidates, so the restrictions on candidates are the same as they have been. However, we think it is infeasible to manually count the karma for every user who might be eligible to vote. So unless there is a serious volunteer effort to calculate everyone's karma by hand, we will treat all maemo.org accounts older than 3 months as eligible for this election only (if it comes to pass that karma is still broken by the next election cycle, it will be up to that Board/Council, and the Community then, to sort out what to do.)

If people with newer accounts think they ought to be eligible to vote (for example, you would have registered earlier but it was impossible to do so at the time because the system was broken), please contact the Council by either responding to this message or, preferably, by emailing council@maemo.org. (Please note, while we will try to process requests for eligibility inclusions as late as possible, we can only realistically guarantee that we'll manage to do it if you get it in a week before the vote for the referendum takes place - so before the 15th of this month.)

- Footnotes -

[1] All three of the original Directors left over time. Texrat/Randall had to depart early on, and Rob (originally in the non-director position of legal adviser) was appointed to replace him. Ivgalvez/Ivan had to leave because he had to relocate himself and his family from one country to another. Tim left shortly after Ivan due to reasons that would take longer to explain than appropriate for this footnote, but which can be found here. Woody and Jim were appointed to replace Ivan and Tim respectively.

[2] Thread where Council solicited Community opinion on the matter of Board re-election. Also here, where both Jim and Woody (two of the current three Board members) indicate support for reelection. Also, a few of the Community members who come to the Council meetings on IRC have indicated a desire to see a re-election happen for several meetings now.

[3] We still do not have a final contract signed with Nokia, but that should not in itself be hindered by a reelection, because the next Board can sign the contract just as easily, and we are starting to suspect they'll get it done faster.

[4] §X ¶2 (¶3 if you count the separated-by-pagebreak paragraph as two) of the Hildon foundation bylaws. (The Board can also trigger an election of both bodies, but that's beside the point.)

[5] There was some disagreement (from one current Board member that we know of) whether this Council officially counts as the Hildon Foundation that the Bylaws refer to previous Council. The alternative would be that the election for electing a Council and the first Hildon Foundation Board members at the same time did not mean for the Council to be the Hildon Foundation Council. This, to be frank, is clearly not what any member of the Community would expect, since the Council was written in to the Hildon Foundation Bylaws as a way to formally include the already existing Council for communication with Nokia into the new, Nokia-independent framework. Nor is it what was intended by the person mainly responsible for writing the bylaws (Woody, who is currently another member of the Board). Finally, if the Hildon Foundation Council is not the current Maemo Community Council, then A. the Board has failed to appoint or call for the elections of a Hildon Foundation Council for 6 months, and B. this makes no logical sense because the election criteria for the Hildon Foundation are determined by the Hildon Foundation Council according to the bylaws. So if a Council wasn't intended to be initiated at the same time as Hildon Foundation Board was, how is Hildon Foundation supposed to execute an election of either the next Board or a Council, if there is no Council to set the election eligibility criteria?

[6] We only ever had 3 Directors. The bylaws state that the Board can spend at most seven days in a row with less than 3 directors, else an election has to happen. §IV ¶6 (¶7 if you count the paragraph split into two pages two paragraphs) of the Hildon Foundation bylaws. This has occured. This post counts the dates and times of official (in-writing) resignations and acceptance-of-assignment statements of Directors. Other earlier posts, for example by joerg, in the same thread, indicate that the same gap of more than 7 days applies to the informal resignation and acceptance statements.

[7] A more verbose/formal announcement can be seen here, in the latest Council meeting.