Some thoughts on e-mail votes now that we've had our first one - perhaps
we should formalize these into a policy.
The constitution says:
6.6. Quorum and Voting. A majority of the current OGB members in office shall
constitute a quorum for the transaction of business. The vote of a
majority of the OGB members present at a meeting at which a quorum is
present shall be the act of the OGB.
6.9. Action Without a Meeting. Any action required or permitted to be taken
at a meeting of the OGB may be taken without a meeting if all the members
of the OGB consent thereto in writing, and such writing is filed with the
minutes of the proceedings of the OGB. Such consent shall have the same
effect as a unanimous vote.
Perhaps this is another legalese that escapes me, but I'm assuming the last
statement does not mean that consenting to vote by e-mail does not indicate
a vote in favor and that e-mail votes must thus be unanimous.
I would say that the act of filing a vote of yea, nay, or abstain is
automatically granting consent for a vote via e-mail, and thus the only
times in which a OGB member needs to explicitly give consent for a vote
should be:
1) when they wish to allow a vote, but not cast even an abstain (the ARC's
have traditionally allowed a fourth vote type of "Not Participating" which
is effectively the same as being absent for the vote - it does not count
towards the total used to determine a majority of votes cast, and is
generally used when the member was not able to be present for a review nor
catch up offline, and thus feels they don't have enough information to
vote).
2) When they know in advance they will be unable to access e-mail for an
extended period (more than a couple of days) and wish to send a message
in advance granting blanket permission for the remaining OGB members to
conduct any e-mail votes they see fit during their absence. A quorum
of members would still be needed to vote yea, nay or abstain in order to
conduct business, so with the current board of 7 members, no more than 3
at a time could do this (and hopefully more than 1 at a time will be
rare).
For the votes themselves, should we require they be signed via PGP or S/MIME
so that outsiders can't forge e-mails, or do we just assume OGB members will
notice and speak up quickly enough if a vote is cast in their name?
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
