Allowing member organisations to vote in elections

[lexnederbragt]

See https://github.com/carpentries/2020_Bylaw_revision/issues/27

From the 2019 Vice Chair:

This comment is about allowing organizations to vote, in addition to individuals (currently the only voting is from individuals). This conversation arose because there are organizations who are members of the Carpentries, but despite supporting the organization financially, have no other say in governance. One possible solution is to allow organizations with memberships a vote. The only way to implement this would be to allow the point of contact for the organization a vote. In some cases, the point of contact is also a Voting Member themselves, so they would in effect have two votes. My personal opinion is that this would be logistically difficult (effectively adding another category of votes), but worthwhile in adding value to organizational memberships.

Comment from the Membership Team, May 2020:

The Membership Team had a discussion about voting rights for Organsiational Members this last week, and we came to the same conclusion that this conversation involves a lot more than the bylaws. We will keep working on it, and perhaps be ready to suggest changes to the next round of bylaw revisions!

[kariljordan]

Hi @lexnederbragt, can you update the opening comment in this issue with more context? This repo is public, but the GitHub issue you referenced is private, so we want to make sure the community knows what is being proposed.

[lexnederbragt]

I added the information from the original issue.

[konrad]

At our retreat 2022 we concluded that member organization have already a certain level on influence as the host members of community who can vote and raise proposal. Due to this the Government Committee would suggest to close this issue without including the suggestion.

[kariljordan]

Agreed! Thank you so much. Please include this update during your standing committee report for the Q4 meeting.

[Talishask]

Initially I do think our member organisations should have a vote. I do not think this would be as difficult as suggested (in the github issue). If I remember correctly, we download the voter list in an excel file and could either (1) use remove duplicates feature in excel/sheets to avoid providing member contacts two votes when they are also an active member of the community, or (2) set the vote in election buddy to only provide 1 vote per person. Now considering providing voting to member organisation contacts who are not active members of the community brings a questions to my mind: Are we providing member contacts a vote because they pay for something? or is it the act of organising a Carpentries community something that we consider (an active member of the community)? Essentially, now I'm wondering who we are targeting as voting members of the community and what the goals of voting are? because some of our active members of the community tend to be left out of voting because they are not in a "visible" volunteer role like training or teaching. For me, I need the answer to that question and that will support the question about member organisations should have voting rights.

[elletjies]

In (most of) the agreement a member organisation signs, it states: “Through activities conducted pursuant to this Agreement, the parties intend to further the missions of xxxxxxx and The Carpentries through the organisation of workshops, collaborations, and educational initiatives between xxxxx and the parties to enhance research computing practices.”

Thus even though they are paying for a service (the money we receive from them also supports the day-to-day activities of The Carpentries), this service is furthering The Carpentries' mission. Our volunteers also further our mission. Thus I am leaning towards having membership organisations as voting members.

[yabellini]

Are we reopening this discussion?

[kariljordan]

Hi @yabellini, yes, I will reopen this now so that the EC can review the comments from our Membership Team.

[yabellini]

Great ! a few more details about the reasoning:

Member institutions already have voting members (like instructors and trainers). So they already have people who are part of the community and can influence the government process.

It this reasoning correct?

Some questions from my side (perhaps you already discuss this before, but I'm a new member of the EC):

How would a membership institution vote? Are we given an extra vote (of all they have because of the people from their institution that are voting members already)? It is the same for all memberships, or do we give more votes to those who give more money? To whom will be given this vote? what do we do with the sponsors? what do we do with those who give us grants?

[Talishask]

I'd recommend voting be limited to one vote per person regardless of the number of roles they hold within our community. So just as someone who is both a maintainer and instructor would only get one vote, someone who is both a member contact and instructor would get only one vote.

I do not think funding should influence whether an organisation or individual has a vote within our community.

In response to the question on who the vote for member organisations should be given to, I'd recommend the main point of contact for the membership. However, all member contacts are not also voting members of our community. Some members contacts are only member contacts (organising the carpentries community in their region). So this goes back to the question that I posed for the Executive Council: What is the purpose of voting? What are our goals for providing a vote to certain members of our community? and who are we giving a voice to with voting?

I ask these questions because our current bylaws provide voting (without any action needed) only to trainers and instructors. We have many active roles in our community (maintainers, discussion hosts, workshop helpers, community organisers, and more), however, these individuals need to ask in order to get access to voting. Is someone who organises their local community (similar to a member contact who is not also an instructor/trainer) considered as "making a significant contribution to The Carpentries" as outlined in our bylaws?

[yabellini]

Yes! We already have extended who can vote in the last two elections, and we are discussing adding this to the bylaws (I mean for the other roles that contributed to our community), like the one you mentioned (and, for example, the one I can have, because we don't have member institutions on my region so, is hard for me contribute as instructor and trainer because more of the event I can participate are self-organized, I will add translation too to that list).

It is still hard for me to see an institution as an individual.

[sstevens2]

I think we mostly agree that expanding voting to other community contribution roles is a good idea - translation, maintainer/lesson contributions, etc. And it would be preferable to have better automated tracking of these types of contributions so folks don't have to request to be able to vote but instead are already included. Edit: I think we could address this by including more options for what a "significant" contribution as a maintainer/translator/community organiser/other roles could include and trying to find a way to track these contributions so they automatically get the opportunity to vote.

The issue seems to be more related to voting by membership organizations in the community elections. The current system of having both community and council elected individuals helps to maintain community involvement while also gathering expertise in governance that may come from outside the community. I also don't feel like institutions should be seen as individuals. I think it is better to keep the community election to individuals participating in the community rather than giving organizations a vote because they are paying for a membership.

In addition, while we said each individual should only get 1 vote, people like me who manage a membership and also teach a lot (or otherwise contribute to the community) would either get two votes (one for their org and one for their community involvement) or their organization wouldn't get to vote because they are active in the community. Either option is sort of confusing.

[Talishask]

Agreed... I also think we are in agreeance on most of these things.

I think I am advocating for considering a member contact as a local community coordinator similar to regional coordinators or others who champion and organise their local carpentries communities. While it is easier to track contributions from things like leading discussions, demos, maintaining lessons, and teaching; those who are doing a lot of work in coordinating and bringing folks together in their local communities may not be included in our expanded voting conversations. So what I am trying to ask is: how are we considering and including those who coordinate local Carpentries communities as active members of our community?

If we do consider community coordination active work in our community, we should figure out how to give them a voice in our elections (still limiting this to 1 vote per person). This would capture and include those doing coordination in communities with memberships (member representatives) and without memberships.

[anenadic]

To me it seems like we have two issues here:

1. Whether to expand the voting rights to include other (individual) community roles (i.e. Contributing, Maintaining, Championing, Translating, etc. members) - which everyone seems to agree is the way forward.
   • A related sub-issue (with some split opinions) if we should allow Organisation members one vote each (regardless of which email is used as contract and whether the contact person also qualifies for another individual vote - this is a technical issue, see point 2. below). If we allow Organisation votes, this vote is separate (and can indeed be different) from the vote that the organisational contact makes individually (if they also qualify for that) - in the former case they are representing their organisation and in the latter it is their personal opinion.
2. How to technically solve/implement the voting, which includes (but is probably not limited to):
   • Difficulty in automatically tracking different contributions that do not belong to instructors and trainers
   • Members, who are not e.g. instructors or trainers, having to request voting rights and provide proof of their contributions which may make them less likely to engage in voting
   • Technical issue that we cannot have a person vote twice with the same email address as an individual and a representative of an organisation - which could be solved by having email aliases or two different emails addresses of the same person

[konrad]

The Executive Council of The Carpentries agreed in the meeting of December, 2, 2022 that there is no need to give voting rights to institutions. Selected reasons are: 1) Member institutions host voting members and due to this have the chance to influence the decision process 2) If only member institutions are allowed to vote, regions that do not have as strong financial standing and cannot afford memberships are discriminated.

Due to this, we will close this issue without a change of the bylaws regarding this point. Instead, we will further extend eligibility of voting based on further contributions (see #15).