Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Thank you for this rather concise wording and moving this forward. Yes, changing Council rules requires a referendum; Full stop. Said referendum is well overdue since many things still point at Nokia, which has not been a factual participant for a long while now.

I think part of that was more of a concern that it would be difficult for non-EU members to be actual members of the GA. Anonymity was one issue raised by a few people, but only a handful. Most in that camp were also fine with having limitations on their "absolute say" being gospel for retaining said anonymity, save maybe one.

This is where we disagree. Council rules are already alterable by the "passive members". I see why that's concerning, but also, so what? It won't impact the e.V. even if they did, since they have no legal standing within it.

Say the Council goes crazy and passes a referendum that promotes something illegal (like posting copyrighted material). The Board can halt the activity, as it should and legally can/must under German law. No matter what Council's "rules" say, they have no legal ground to enforce it. Just like when Nokia ran the show.

I can start a David Hasselhoff fan club, and make a rule that K.I.T.T. must appear in all of his future music videos. It won't impact him or his production staff, no matter how vocal our fan club is or how many there are of us. If the producers don't hold the rights to use that image, they simply can't, and won't.

If someone really wants to push an issue, that's what GA membership is all about. Put your name on the line, sign on for accepting part of the legal responsibility for it by being a member, and convince enough others to do the same and take legal responsibility for said action. Don't want to do that? Sucks to be you, because that's how the real world works.

This same argument (by the same people, I might add) is the main reason HiFo failed quite as spectacularly as it did. Several people wanted to have "absolute say", but almost none of them wanted to take on the legal responsibility/liability for those choices. That's why HiFo as yet to have a single Board member complete a full 2- year term without resigning, myself included.

I'm hoping the e.V. will do better, but so far... I'm seeing lots of the same patterns (and same rabble rousers).

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Well that is why you need an account at least... it is not that I care much about changing that, I am fine the way it is - just wanted to point out that I don't like the whole "anonymous" request towards MCeV, I am still not fine with not having proper verification of our members, in a soccer club, you know people as you meet them in person, but here we have 10k people most of them I never met AFK so I don't know how they look or if their name is their real name!

Yeah I am pretty close to suggest to remove council from MCeV for good, that would need some reorganization of things but well, as soon as HiFo hands over there is legal ground to act. Or maybe we have a referendum prepared just as simple as "Is it ok with you to integrate council election rules completely withing MCeV Association Rules!" first so we cut the discussion about if there are two councils once and for all.

I agree with most of your other contributions but I need to ask to stop calling GA a membership or refer to it as something you can sign up for. GA = General Assembly = Meeting of all regular members of an association. This is one thing I need to explain to people asking about MCeV every time like "Where is the application to join GA, I don't seem to find it only your MCeV application form, is that it?"

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

> I don't like the whole "anonymous" request towards MCeV

Council's requests are not legally binding, it's just a pack of anonymous people who were considered apt at keeping track of daily needs of the project. So I went through MCeV bylaws again to see which of them are legally binding.

7.5. The Board of Directors executes the Council's and General Assembly's rulings.

This is problematic. I would rewrite it as 'The Board of Directors executes the General Assembly's rulings and the Council's rulings but can refuse them for legal reasons'.

8.4, 8.5, 9.2, 10.2-10.6. elections of all kinds, organizing and chairing meetings including GA and passive members meetings.

If we suddenly don't want to trust an independent selected passive member with this, this can be rewritten to say that at least ONE member of council must be an active member responsible for these things on Council behalf.

12.4. Bylaws, which the Council is authorised to enact are governed by the Association Rules.

(What is "Association Rules"?) Obviously Council is not authorized to enact new rules in the MCeV bylaws. This line would probably have to be removed.

> Yeah I am pretty close to suggest to remove council from MCeV for good,

Per the above, I believe that either leaving things as is or having someone 'represent' the Council in eV (such as one Councilor who is an active eV member) would work.

> "Is it ok with you to integrate council election rules completely withing MCeV bylaws!"

No. This belongs to "12.2. The Board of Directors and the Council are authorised to enact internal regulations for themselves".

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

gryllida, thank you for confusing everybody...

for 7.5, do you really need to have this written there? Isn't it obvious? Also you may ad a 5 page list of what council may actually rule on... and so on...


8.4, 8.5, 9.2, 10.2-10.6. our regular members are as anonymous to me as our council, some even more!

12.4. why should it be removed, that is part of what they actually be able to do... (maybe we should change the word bylaws in that regard to "rules"... and either we have another language problem here but what I read sounds like you think these rules/regulations etc are to be setup in the future, the MCeV was registered at court last year, these are enacted 'articles/rules')

for the last bit:

MCeV bylaws are all of them, not a single one of them is called bylaws on its own, another confusion by a language that isn't as precise as needed in such case. Someone should probably make this clear on that wiki page as the set of 3 articles/regulations currently have two names on that page.

1. Articles of incorporation (that is what everybody refers to as bylaws it seems, should change that name to articles of association, sorry for the sloppy translation that was probably me)
2. Association Rules (in wiki as General Regulations, no idea why but can we stop calling things three different names?)
3. Board of Directors' Internal Regulations (short Board Regulations)

can we maybe just not use the word bylaws...?

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

You're right that there was a translation problem. I had interpreted bylaws as 'this big piece of writing on the signup for MCeV form' but they include 2 documents in addition to that.

> 8.4, 8.5, 9.2, 10.2-10.6. our regular members are as anonymous to me as our council, some even more!

"Council was elected by a bunch of anonymous people and I can't bear with its rulings which one random active member gave me. help!"

"Council was elected by a bunch of anonymous people and includes only anonymous people and I can't bear with its rulings. help!"

There is not much options here.

1) Leave council as is and accept rulings from a fully anonymous entity. (Somehow HiFo trusted that the passive members listing on website is not hijacked by sockpuppets and this option worked for it for years. ... This is what the current version of bylaws also has.)
2) Leave council as is but require one Councilor is an active member and files rulings on its behalf while they are still dubious because this active member was elected by a bunch of anonymous people.
3) ?? <your suggestion here>
4) ...
5) Limit council elections electorate to active members and require everyone on council is an active member (this option can be only after everyone shouts 'join MCeV!!!' for a week non-stop and falls over after everybody was already nagged about joining it as much as possible).
6) Stop accepting rulings from Council. Only accept rulings from GA.

Can we just write "upon the active members number reaching N, the next council election is done by the active members and all candidates are required to join as an active member", agree on some value of N, and do things the anonymous ad-hoc way before then?

I would say make participation in elections compulsory (100%, or require that at least 50% participate before the election is considered valid) for active members, and pick a value of N which is of the same order of magnitude as the usual number of people participating in an election.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Why are you trying to force council elections to be inside MCeV, the idea behind council is to have a rep for associated members so they should elect their own rep. (I was more about the rules not the election)

GA quorum is given with 2/3 iirc (read the rules please)

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

> Why are you trying to force council elections to be inside MCeV, the idea behind council is to have a rep for associated members so they should elect their own rep. (I was more about the rules not the election)
> 8.4, 8.5, 9.2, 10.2-10.6. our regular members are as anonymous to me as our council, some even more!

These two statements contradict. Either you want to execute rulings of a fully anonymous council or you don't. (The currently active version on wiki says that you do. I wanted to say the same but then saw "I don't like the whole 'anonymous' request towards MCeV" lines and tried to respond to that by suggesting that you trust 1 active member or force a change in council elections - both of these were not a thing I myself wanted but I thought I should offer them to resolve that quoted problem.)

I probably should not have interfered with this discussion. Sorry. I'm running low on reading comprehension resources, partly because of two language barriers involved (one yours and one mine with mine being more annoying).

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

OK, I'm apparently confused. And if I'm confused or misinformed about this while trying to follow it, imagine how confused others are. Don't forget that most of this info is in German, which many don't understand. I have about the German literacy of a 5 year old, so most of it is well above my reading level.

My understanding (which may be very wrong) was that any member of the MCeV legally has to submit information about themselves to prove they are a viable and unique human being.

My recollection was that this "proof of person-hood" was required to be a registered member of the GA and to run for an office. There was also confusion early on if one was required to be an EU citizen to hold office. Admittedly, I stopped following this before legal papers were filed, so understandings and such could have changed (and apparently did?)

Knowing what is and isn't true of the above would be good for this conversation I think, and it sounds like you and Win7Mac are the two most versed people on it (being deeply involved and native speakers).

IMHO: HiFo made a mistake attempting to integrate Council beyond acknowledging it and allowing a reciprocal reset button. Had I to do it over again, I would have had one small paragraph in the bylaws defining Council (pointing at it's existence legally), and stating as long as it exists and has a reciprocal rule, either can call for forced joint elections. End of Integration.

My big lesson learned from HiFo is that trying to incorporate any non-entity (that can't have legal standing or liability) into a legal framework is asking for trouble.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Not being native german speaker, I'll throw my tuppence in the ring anyway :p

It is required by law that a person applying for membership of MCeV presents sufficent proof-of-identity.
A registered & approved member of MCeV is automatically a member of GA, and thus has voting rights in the assembly.

T̶o̶ ̶h̶o̶l̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶M̶C̶e̶V̶ ̶B̶o̶a̶r̶d̶ ̶M̶e̶m̶b̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶a̶ ̶m̶e̶m̶b̶e̶r̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶s̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶a̶r̶i̶z̶e̶d̶ ̶I̶D̶ ̶d̶o̶c̶u̶m̶e̶n̶t̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶(̶s̶)̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶n̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶m̶a̶n̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶i̶d̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶E̶U̶ ̶m̶e̶m̶b̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶r̶y̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶[/b]i̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶q̶u̶i̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶l̶a̶w̶[/b]

To hold an office of MCeV Board, a member has to present a notarized ID documentation proving that (s)he is a citizen or legal resident of an EU member country. This again is required by law

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Ah. Thanks. I think I see where the issue is now?

My understanding was that GA was MCeV members that were not specifically officers. If GA is some super-set of members and non-members, then what defines a GA non-member? And do those non-members have voting rights?

If non-members == garage users, and voting rights in MCeV is extended to all GA then I see the issue (not dissimilar to HiFo's issue noted above). If not, then I need more clarification.

Also, a special note to MCeV and HiFo board members: Check your e-mail. There's a clock ticking that needs to be urgently addressed.