Membership Elections etc

I just wrapped up the nomination and election process for new Charter Members. I believe it was very successful - with 93% turnout (that's only 3 votes not received) and about 70% of the votes going to the top 15 nominees - so it was very representative of the groups wishes.

It was a busy couple of weeks - lining up all the nominations, confirming with nominees, confirming that all charter members received the instructions for voting, tabulating votes, following up with several reminders, contacting all nominees, publishing the results, etc.

With the new Charter Member election out of the way, next we will be updating the Board of Directors. There is a requirement that we regularly replace half of the Board. This helps keep things fresh and avoid lots of other hypothetical problems - the least of which is potential burn-out.

Five of the current board members will be replaced, as per Proposed Board Election Procedure. Current Board members have the option to:

1. step down and stand for re-election
2. resign
3. be randomly selected to step down or resign

In a couple days I will apply a random filter to select the 5 who will be removed (the others remain on for another year).

Then we will start a nomination process to elect some of the Charter Members into Board of Director seats. If you are a Charter Member, I encourage you to start brainstorming about who from the other Charter Members list you think would be best for helping lead OSGeo into the next two years. Nominations and voting will be limited to the Charter Members.

On another election-related note, I am helping run the Francophone (French speaking) Chapter elections. They are organising into an official Local Chapter and are currently choosing the chairs of various committees.

Membership Management

Every time we talk about membership I am reminded of the need for some membership management tools. It might have something to do with going from 45 to 59 members and having the list scroll off the bottom of my screen now.

I have recently been testing the CiviCRM application and it looks promising for our kind of organisation. It comes integrated into our CMS which is a bonus.

CiviCRM allows members to sign themselves up as members, opt-in to various groups, submit donations, manage and volunteer for events and more. If you have experience using it, please let me know so I can reduce my learning curve and hear what you think of it.