Self-nomination for By-Law Review Committe

[David Graham]

My name is David Graham, also known as cdlu. I am currently a contributing
member of SPI, and the Chairman of the Open and Free Technology Community,
an SPI member project. I would like to serve on SPI's by-law review
committee because I believe the by-laws have some room for improvement and
clarification.

OFTC's website: http://www.oftc.net/

At OFTC, I co-wrote the Constitution with David Harris (ElectricElf) and
chair weekly Network Operations Committee meetings to administer the
project. OFTC's constitution is, incidentally, also being put before a
review committee to look over and improve it.

OFTC's constitution: http://www.oftc.net/policy/constitution/

I hope to help fix the by-laws where I perceive them to be broken.

Among the changes I would like to see are cosmetic fixes, such as putting
numbers in a consistant format, and major changes such as forcing the
board to be elected at an annual general meeting of contributing members,
to serve for a fixed term. I believe that the membership and the member
projects should be the controlling force of SPI. To this end, I think the
board needs to lose its absolute power and be accountable to the
membership.

I also would like to help steer SPI away from being Debian's parent
organisation in favour of being Debian, Berlin, OSI, GNOME, OFTC, LSB,
TeXmacs, and any other projects that join's parent organisation. I have
some ideas for this which I outlined in a message to spi-general at the
beginning of December 2002. Though the changes I proposed were radical, I
believe at least some of the ideas can be used when updating the by-laws.

Mailing list message:
http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2002-December/000522.html

I have the free time needed to dedicate to this project and can fit
virtually any meeting time slot into my not particularly full schedule.

David Graham
cdlu at pkl.net