Re: [Fsfe-uk] New committee proposal

[Alex Hudson]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 11:09:03AM +0100, Jason Clifford wrote:
> If there were three positions and Andrew's election to the committee has 
> been blocked without any reference to the membership something seems to be 
> wrong to me.

This is the case - there were three positions. Because there was no contest,
according to the AFFS constitution formal elections were not applicable. 
However, one of the problems that has unsurfaced is that it doesn't look
possible that we would have been able to call an election in any event. This 
is one of the serious problems I referred to earlier. 

So, the process was essentially one of co-option, not election. Now, 
because that decision would be without real reference to members - in 
either direction, asking people on or not - it was made cautiously, and as 
I'm sure Andrew would agree, he was somewhat 'controversial'. Committee 
felt it couldn't co-opt him. 

You're basically right, something is wrong - we had intended to run an 
election, and it wasn't possible. As a committee, we don't want to be 
co-opting people: it's not what we set out to do, and actually it
doesn't work constitutionally either. However, it also appears to be the
case that without reworking the particular part of the constitution,
we cannot run elections sensibly. So clearly we have to fix it. Given I
was one of the people who signed the constitution, I feel particularly
responsible - I have been part of organisations structured similarly to
AFFS in the past, and I have never experienced problems running elections
like this. This is something I feel I should have caught, especially with
the amount of discussion it received (although, IIRC, there were only a few
people who really did read it fully, it did start out quite buggy).

I would appreciate it if we could hold discussions on the hows and whys of
fixing until the others get back - of course, that's up to you guys, but I
think the discussion would benefit from the summary of the process that
Brian is preparing.

Cheers,

Alex.