Moving this over from the prior thread…
If it is genuinely about the future, then the proposed change ought to specify that it does not take effect “for one year” or some other specified period. This is a standard practice in legislative law, and it fully de-fangs the (valid!) concerns of voters about being pressured to make a decision “RIGHT NOW” that comes into force immediately and brings potentially serious consequences with it.
The proposal also ought to specify that anyone who was consulted privately about the proposed change is barred from standing for election as a non-member-candidate, because that is a five-alarm conflict of interest. You could easily sunset that clause after, say, five years or so on. Notably, that is a common-sense change that prevents abuse by bad actors, but does not impair anyone, since there is no barrier-to-entry for these hypothetical candidates to simply get involved in GNOME and become members.
It’s still a bad procedural move to have started a ticking clock on this second-edition of the proposal without having first invited foundation members to provide input. Both the changes above are obvious, and if you had said you were going to revise it, I could have and would have put them out there immediately (and perhaps others, with the benefit of some time to work on them). No doubt there are other foundation members who would also have had input.
Can we make those changes? And ask the membership for others, then update the time-to-reply clock when there’s been feedback?
Not having that information public and attempting to jam through the revision is what suggests that this proposal might in reality be about some specific candidate(s) that you know are planning to run as soon as it gets done. That’s quite obviously inappropriate, so let’s please throttle back, alleviate those concerns by being forthright about the process and reframing it without the “approve this right now!” time pressure, which is artificial and arbitrary.
No, I think the fundamental difference is that I believe in transparency and working in the open. And as top-priority principles. And that was not done in this case.
You should not engage in a private process to draft a revision to the bylaws in the first place; you should have invited and welcomed input from the membership on any underlying problem you identified; you should have invited and listened to ideas and input from the membership on any proposed solution to said underlying problem, and you should have promoted and communicated the proposal of a bylaws change in advance, rather than dropping it without warning on a Friday night. Yes, I’m aware that it’s always evening somewhere.
But you didn’t do any of those things. You drew up a revision to the governance structure privately, then told the membership to approve it because it wasn’t going to be a big deal (here I’m referring to your reply to Karen Sandler, paragraph 6, in the other thread). But, as that other thread demonstrated, the members in fact had a lot of questions and feedback, once they were invited to contribute it. Several others have had further feedback since then.
That illustrates why working in the open is vital: the foundation gets better results when you make the process open, not something that you conduct secretly and only deploy on your own terms.
A closed process is bad, period. It’s exponentially moreso when it involves altering the governance structure of the foundation itself, as this proposal does, because that puts the very foundation itself at substantial risk.