Community Council/Election process

The 5 council members will be elected by the community.

  1. Nominations will be accepted 2 weeks before the election begins from any community member with a karma of 100 or above.
  2. Elections last for 1 week.
  3. Only community members who have had maemo.org accounts for over 3 months, and have karma of 10 or above, may vote.
  4. Each community member eligible to vote gets a single ballot.
  5. The 5 nominees voted for most, as counted by a single transferrable vote system are elected.
  6. Nominees with a professional interest in Maemo, such as working for Nokia - or any other company involved in Maemo-related software development - must declare their interest when advertising their nomination. Failure to do so may result in the Nokia Community Manager, or the outgoing Council, declaring their nomination invalid and so bar them from standing in the current election.
  7. There is no limit to the number of times a council member can stand for re-election.
  8. The date of the next election will be set by the council chair, not more than 6 months after the previous election.
  9. The election date must be publicised at least 1 month in advance of the election.
  10. If fewer than 6 candidates stand for election, the 3 with the most votes are elected to the council.
  11. If there are fewer than 4 candidates when the nominations close, the election cannot be held.
    1. The nomination period will be extended by 1 month and the election postponed similarly.
    2. If, after 1 month's delay, there are still fewer than 4 candidates; the outgoing council will decide - in conjunction with Hildon Foundation Board of Directors - about how to proceed. The preferred solution is to encourage more members of the maemo.org community to participate and re-run the election, but all options are open.
  12. Changes to any of the above rules must be approved by community referendum.
    1. Voting in such referenda will be open to anyone eligible to vote in the council elections.
    2. The referendum options must be debated for a minimum of 1 month prior to the referendum.
    3. Referendum voting will be open for the same length of time as the council elections.

Contents

[edit] Running an election

Running an election has several distinct phases:

The first and second phase is entirely the resonsibility of the outgoing community council. The third phase requires a list of maemo.org account holders at a certain date, and thus requires the intervention of someone with access to maemo.org infrastructure, and also requires access to a specific database on test.maemo.org, which again requires access. However, the access is only required for a small part of the step, and it is the council's responsibility to provide all of the information needed to create the election. The fourth step requires OpenSTV, a project licenced under the GPL, but which the author has decided to sell. It is difficult to find newer versions of OpenSTV online, even though the software is GPL v2 licenced. We should check and older version of OpenSTV into maemo2midgard to enable us to count elections reliably.


[edit] Community Council Referenda

Changes to the election process require a referendum.

[edit] Current referenda

[edit] Previous referenda

In order to repair special cases in MCC rules, and bring them into alignment with HFC rules, the following: (MCC Rule List) Shall become (HFC Rule List), and the Maemo Community Council will from now on be transformed into Hildon Foundation Council. Yes or No?

Follow the discussion here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1330915

Dedicated wiki page here: Council Rules Amendment Referendum

Three referenda were run from February 16 2009 until February 23 2009 to decide some procedural datas around elections.

[edit] Community Council Elections

[edit] Current election

[edit] Past Elections