This election will be a very special one, considering the state of Maemo and Nokia and how things have unfolded over the past few months.
The election timescale (all times UTC) is as follows:
Nominations open: 00:00, Saturday, 15th September 2012
Nominations close: 23:59, Friday, 28th September 2012
Voting opens: 00:00, Saturday, 6th October 2012
Voting closes: 23:59, Friday, 12th October 2012
What will be decided?
This year there are two elections to be run in parallel.
COUNCIL MEMBERS – The council is a body of volunteers taken from the Maemo community that acts as a focal point for the community. Historically, Council’s role has been limited to representing developers on, and users of, maemo.org to Nokia (and vice versa). Examples of council activity can be found on the Council homepage or in the blog. The role of Council will continue to be as it was before, as a group to work with the Community, and act as a focal point for communication with group in charge of services needed by the community to continue, whomever that turns out to be.
BOARD MEMBERS- Due to Nokia’s state, its funding for maemo.org in 2013 is uncertain. The community is working on bylaws for a new legal entity (currently with the working title “Hildon Foundation”) that can legally inherit the domain name or have donations (monetary, hardware and/or data) from Nokia, the current providers, and community members, which can be used to continue operation of resources vital to the community. The bylaws are currently in discussion, and will be formalized shortly. The initial Board for the Foundation will be elected parallel to, and with the same election rules and requirements as, those currently established for Council elections. It is expected that the Board elected for this new entity will adopt the community’s desired bylaws and be ready to take the reigns as soon as the entity is ready for operation.
How does the vote work?
Each member of maemo.org, who has an account that is more than 3 months old and who has earned over 10 “karma” points on that account, gets an electronic ballot. This election ballot is a pair of “single transferrable votes”. Voters will rank their Council candidates in order of preference; understanding that if their top candidate cannot get elected with the votes they receive, the votes are redistributed by rank order until all five seats have been allocated. They will then be able to vote for Board members in the same manner as the Council election above, with the list of candidates running for that body.
What’s next?
Community members should be considering whether they want to stand for Council, the Board, or possibly for both. Anyone who has karma of over 100 is eligible to stand, including employees and sub-contractors of Nokia. When nominations open, you can nominate someone via an email to the maemo-community mailing list (which they must reply to and accept in order to be considered a candidate) or you can put your own hat into the ring by emailing the same list indicating such.
To be clear, candidates may choose to run for the Board, for Council, or for both bodies. Elections will be held at the same time, but each body will be voted on and tabulated completely separately. If a single candidate runs for both positions, they will appear in both ballot lists. At no point will vote tallies flow from one election source into the other.
Edit: For reasons not entierly clear, this Council blog post did not create a matching TMO thread. Instead, one has been created for disucssion by the Chair with referal links to this page.
