GNOME Foundation Election Rules & Timeline


Election Rules

  1. See the GNOME Foundation charter for general rules.

  2. There are 11 board slots that are to be filled during this election.

  3. Elections are for registered voters (future members of the GNOME Foundation) only. Anyone who has made a contribution to GNOME can register. You may do so by sending email to membership-committee@gnome.org. People with CVS accounts can add themselves to membership.txt in the Gnome-Foundation module. People who register to vote will automatically become members of the yet-to-be-incorporated GNOME Foundation, although anyone can withdraw their membership at any time.

  4. An election committee consisting of Dan Mueth, Martin Baulig, Russell Steinthal, Chris DiBona and Sergey Panov is in charge of reviewing registration/membership requests and will monitor the membership list for abuse, in accordance with the charter.

  5. To be on the ballot, anyone who is a member can announce their candidacy, in accordance with the timeline below, by sending mail to foundation-announce@gnome.org, including their name, e-mail address, contributions to GNOME, and why they want to be on the board of directors. Candidacies will be cross-posted on foundation-list@gnome.org, where they can be discussed.

  6. Ballots will be sent via e-mail to all members. To vote, members return ballots, selecting up to 11 candidates who will receive their vote. Members may not vote more than once for the same candidate.

  7. The 11 candidates who receive the most votes will be elected.

  8. Not more than 4 slots may be occupied by individuals affiliated with any one company. See charter for definition of affiliation and process for enforcing this rule.

  9. If there is a tie for the 11th slot, the candidates who are tied may choose to let the already elected board members resolve the tie, or, at the request of any of the tied candidates, run-off elections to resolve the tie may be held.

  10. Votes shall be e-mailed to a publicly archived mailing list. The archive shall be made publicly accessible at the conclusion of the elections.

  11. The votes will be tallied automatically, with the election committee stepping in to decide on misformatted returns.

  12. Foundation-list is the mailing list to discuss election-related issues. The election committee will resolve election-related disputes that are not readily resolved on the list.

  13. The election committee will announce the results of the elections.

  14. Summary Statements: All candidates should submit 75-word max summaries of their candidacy statement for inclusion in the ballot information sheet that will be posted on 10/25. The deadline for this is Tuesday 10/24, noon pacific time. Candidates should also state their corporate affilitions. Statements that are longer than 75 words will be edited down by the elections committee. Summary statements should be continuous text: bullet lists etc. will be converted to continuous text. For candidates who do not submit a summary statement, the elections committee will use a snippet from their full candidacy statement instead. If we do not receive a sufficient number of these summary statements, the elections committee reserves the right to post these summaries elsewhere.


Timeline