On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 10:03:48AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > Why does the board seem to be against postponing some things, yet the > debian Spain trademark has been postponed many many times?
We're not happy about that one, let me tell you. We are trying to get legal advice from our lawyer for quite a while now on that one; we certainly don't want to authorize the Spanish attorney to launch a lawsuit on our behalf without advice from our own lawyer. If you will respond that it should have taken much less time than it has, I fully agree. As mentioned in an unrelated thread on -private, Bdale has been working with our lawyer to try to reduce the backlog of questions he's dealing with, and it may simply come down to needing to pay him so that he can give us more time than pro-bono work allows. > Government deals with intrusive and dangerous topics and yet many > government meetings allow contributions with hours of notice - or > less. For example, there's a public participation standing item at > tonight's council meeting. 15 minutes max of a ~120 minute meeting, > no notice required, no format required, but it's encouraged to make > clear any suggested actions. Why can't SPI allow at least that level > of participation? The equivalent amount of time at SPI's meetings (we try to keep them under an hour) would be 7.5 minutes, which is certainly not enough time to think through most decisions from first mention if one is expected to vote at the end of that time period. If members wish to simply have a discussion involving the board and the members, everyone can give well more than 7.5 minutes of time on SPI's email lists, leading up to a vote at the following meeting. This seems like quite a high level of participation, which is unavailable to any governmental councils which do not have email lists with councilmembers and residents/stakeholders both included. It also seems a better way to keep in the loop any other members who may not be in attendance at a meeting where an issue is being raised by a member with no notice. (This problem is rather similar to the opensource.org issue being raised by the board with undesirably little advance notice to the membership.) In any case, while responsiveness to member initiatives is important, this seems unrelated to your issue of increasing the board's transparency and communication of its discussions and plans to the membership. Let's please at least try to remain clear about all the distinct issues you're raising and not confuse them with each other. - Jimmy Kaplowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Spi-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general
