[part 2] Article 3: Membership

[Dale Scheetz]

On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Darren Benham wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 29, 1999 at 12:03:36PM -0500, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> > Sorry to take so long to reply, but the tooth came out on Friday, and I'm 
> > "much better now" ;-)
> That's okay.  Most of my response are intended to get people to think.  I
> don't often expect direct replies :).
> 
> > Keeping up with "active" members is much easier than deciding whether or
> > not they have met "qualification requirements" for each year they "claim"
> > membership.
> > 
> > I simple membership list ping, before meetings, would determine who was
> > active and who wasn't. If they can be reached, they should still have the
> > opportunity to vote.
> and if they respond affermative, they still wish to be involved.  I'm
> ambivilent to the requirments checking.
> 
> > But if they "just disapear", so what? 
> I'm thinking of voting and such...

Ah! Now I understand ;-)

Well, I thought that voting was TBD, and was, for the sake of argument,
being left 'til later. (I'm not sure that I completely agree with this,
but it has made the discussion easier so far)

> 
> Lets say we have 1000 people on the roles but, because of people
> disappearing we have only 100 active people... or 100 active people who
> will vote on any given issue, anyway.  Given Debian's voting rules, any
> single choice would have to get 48 MORE votes than any other choice...
> 
This assumes that SPI will "naturally" adopt Debian's voting rules.

Given the broad membership that SPI is expected to acquire, a direct
democracy would be quite inefficient for "getting the job done".

Think of SPI as a "representative democracy", where the membership votes
for its representative, in the form of the board, and those
representatives actually "decide" on the particulars of what SPI is
"about". With adequate checks and balances, this produces a system that
has both the ability to decide in a hurry, coupled with the capability of
long involved contemplation of those decissions and actions.

But it seems that I too, have digressed into the issues of voting, rather
than staying with the question of who should be a member.

One last off-topic-comment: Before each vote, "active" members would be
asked to register for the vote. The number of registered voters would then
determine what "majority" or "super majority" would mean in this
particular vote.

Under normal voting conditions, you know when you have a yes vote, and you
know when you have a no vote, but when you recieve no vote at all, you
don't know whether it is from the voter being unwilling to vote one way or
the other, or the voter is unable to render a vote at all. As those who
are unable to render a vote, will also be unable to render a reply to the
call for registration, the last group is more clearly identified as
abstaining voters.

Just my POV,

Dwarf
--
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