Are any of the current board members running for the 2017 Board of Directors?

The biggest worry isn’t that you don’t have turnover, the big risk is the loss of continuity if all board seats are changed at once. Here, I agree two year terms would be a bit much, but you could elect half the board every 6 months if the bylaws were updated to permit it.

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While I like the idea of electing half the board every six months, I’m going to speculate that the mechanics of actually holding an election is a big deal, especially for an all-volunteer organization.

It will be interesting to see how well this next election goes, from a process perspective, and how/if the experiment with online voting service alleviates any voting issues or headaches or not.

4.6.1.1. An election of the Board of Directors shall occur at least once per calendar year.
4.6.1.4. A member of the Board of Directors shall not hold a term of office for more than one year without being elected for each year the office is held.

If you look at the Bylaws in section 4.6.1. carefully, you will notice that Board elections are allowed to happen more than once a year without changing the Bylaws.

Board members would have to either 1) voluntarily give up their seats early, or 2) achieve a majority vote and hold an early election for any Board seat(s).

Personally, I’d like to see option 2 in action at least once, but option 1 is far more civil.

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It actually used to be a lot easier for us to hold elections, as we just used an online voting system tied to AD/LDAP. We no longer use that system, in part due to some legal threats by one or two members.

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Though easier, the running of that system required the putting of trust in the hands of a small group of individuals, rather than the group as a whole. @AndrewLeCody is a very talented member and was key to the old system, at the same time he has many Biases towards it. I’m not trying to slam him, as I have bias as well.

The old system didn’t allow for the public checking that your vote was cast the way you expected. This was highlighted when @wandrson asked to check the vote. He had collected the votes of multiple members and had asked the BOD to allow access to the votes to double check votes had been counted as intended. This was considered by the Board to be a request they could grant with our old system. Due to privacy issues and the design of the system.

The new system can allow for this if setup correctly. I hope Ignorance or Tactical Ignorance doesn’t disable this feature in our up coming election.

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In an organization of our size, trust will become increasingly essential in order to survive lest we become burdened addressing every complaint and demand for participation and input at the cost of actually getting things done.

That being said, I feel we could fairly easily manage a volunteer-run election with paper ballots that ensures reasonable transparency, audit-ability, and anonymity.

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We can dip one finger in red ink to signify voting rights and another in purple when a vote has been cast. :wink:

I’m fine with a paper ballot, too, even if it needs to allow an absentee arrangement of some sort.

Was last year’s snafu that big of a deal or just a couple of the usual suspects? Is there a place to read about it?

This is where people got really extra about it, I think:

https://talk.dallasmakerspace.org/t/board-of-directors-election-and-logo-voting-results/8770

I understand your point here. As you state and as I’ve stated earlier to have a paper and online ballot system that is publicly audit-able is pretty easy. It is an example of where we do not need to rely on the trust.

What made it a big deal was that it was highlighted well before the election by Allen Wan that our system didn’t allow for publicly audit-able anonymous ballots. So the only way to publicly audit the election meant that we had to expose the identity of the voter to publicly check their vote was counted correctly. Then after the election happened, Walter asked to publicly check the vote, in which case the board felt it was an undue violation of privacy to allow him to do so. Andrew Lecody made the system, a current board member at the time of the election. So the board made the system we used and denied the request to publicly check the system that we used. I’m not accusing anyone of cheating, just that this is a very high burden of trust.

I don’t think anyone would allow one party of the government to make our national voting system and allow them to also be the ones that audited it. As an example.

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Andrew was also NOT RUNNING in the election. Anyone that knows Andrew would know that he is not the kind of person to play games or rig things his way.

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Nick meant last year when it went into place.

So @uglyknees should be announcing her candidacy any day now :joy:

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I. Will. Fight. You. Woman.
You will win because you’re trained with the whole army thing…but still it will be messy.

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It would be nice to see 5 NEW faces for the next board…

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Bring it! :joy: but seriously I look forward to see you spend some time making things

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Me too - very thankful for you and your efforts and your leadership and your everything.

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Uh, no? This voting system has been around for MANY years. Andrew was not running in the last election, but he ran the online voting system.

I knew he manned it, I wasn’t sure how long it had been around though.

It was always, Andrew’s system. We had used it for a couple of years.