OTW 2011 Board Candidates and Election News

[kristenmurphy.livejournal.com]

The OTW is happy to announce that we have six highly qualified candidates who have stepped forward to fill four seats open on the Board this year, as we bid a grateful farewell to two members of the Board who have reached the end of their three-year terms, Rachel Barenblat and Sheila Lane, and to two members who have chosen to tender their resignations effective at the close of this year, citing personal reasons: Hele Braunstein and Allison Morris.

In alphabetical order by family name, our candidates are: Julia Beck, Naomi Novik, Lucy Pearson, Betsy Rosenblatt, Nikisha Sanders, and Jenny Scott-Thompson. Their personal statements will be available on the OTW Elections website beginning 17 October 2011.

We are currently working to schedule two one-hour chats with the candidates, open to all of our members and to the public. They will be held in the OTW public chatroom, accessible at this link: https://fanarchive.campfirenow.com/e79cc

The dates of the candidate chats will be announced as soon as they are confirmed. If you believe you may be unable to attend but have questions for the candidates, we encourage you to submit them via our contact form to our elections officer, Ira Gladkova, who will present them on your behalf. Transcripts of elections chats will be made available as both text and as screenshots on the elections website, shortly following each event.

Election voting will run from noon UTC on 16 November (What time is that where I live?) to noon UTC on 18 November (What time is that where I live?). Voting is restricted to current OTW members; this includes anyone who has made a donation of US$10 or more between 1 October 2010 and 17 October 2011. To renew your membership, visit http://transformativeworks.org/how-you-can-help/support.

Further information can be found on the OTW Elections website.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Comments

[kylara.livejournal.com]

> Voting is restricted to current OTW members; this includes anyone who has made a donation of US$10 or more between 1 October 2010 and 17 October 2011.

Does voting eligibility include people who don't donate until after October 17?

[kristenmurphy.livejournal.com]

No, it does not; October 17 is the last day to become a voting member for this election.

[kylara.livejournal.com]

Not presenting information on the candidates until the same date that eligibility expires is obviously done intentionally. Potential voters must be eligible to vote before they necessarily know anything about the candidates -- including if there's even one they want to vote for. Is there a statement or something on the website explaining why the elections process is set up this way?

[kristenmurphy.livejournal.com]

Our election policies are available here (http://elections.transformativeworks.org/elections-policies); however, they don't address your specific question about the timeline.

The deadline to qualify as a voter is one month (give or take a day) prior to the election. That allows time for checks to clear (echecks can take two weeks to clear through PayPal, and physically mailed checks -- particularly international mail -- often need more than a week to reach our mailbox, and additional time to clear). Once the list of voters has been finalized, we then need time to create an individual, secure voting account for each voter on the election website.

The date on which the candidate statements are posted is approximately one month after the deadline for declaring candidacy (which was Sept. 21). That month includes time for the candidates to draft, beta, and revise their statements and for the statements to be translated. Pushing the deadline for candidacy earlier would be a way to get the statements earlier, but we'd prefer not to do that because a longer campaign period would place an increased burden and stress on the candidates (who are all carrying out their usual committee responsibilities in addition to campaigning). We also believe fewer candidates would come forward if the deadline were significantly earlier.

Those are some of the considerations affecting the voter eligibility deadline and the date when candidate statements are posted. I realize that these considerations do not explain why the two events fall on exactly the same day. To that question, I would offer a more philosophical response about the purpose of membership. Obviously the organization does have an interest in people becoming members, regardless of who is running for the Board. Membership donations are the OTW's primary source of income, without which the organization could not operate. Voter eligibility is tied to membership because, for legal reasons, we must ensure that each vote represents a real, individual person, and the most practical way to verify that is via membership payments. However, voter eligibility is neither the sole nor the primary purpose of membership. We want people to become OTW members because they support our mission and projects and wish to demonstrate that support financially; and in turn, we want to make sure those supporters have a voice in the direction of the organization. Most of the donations we receive are above the minimum US$10 level, although only US$10 is required for membership; we believe this demonstrates that the majority of our members are interested in supporting the organization above and beyond simply securing the right to vote. We deeply value this demonstration of support (of course, we deeply value contributions of any amount, as well as contributions of volunteer work, particularly in difficult economic times!), and it is our hope that everyone who has chosen to support the OTW through membership will choose to vote in the election. In short, whereas the framing of your question suggests that people become members in order to vote, we're looking at it from the perspective that people become members in order to support the organization and that people who have done so are therefore naturally interested in voting.

All that said: although we don't require it of our candidates, many of them have legal-name journals or other personal sites where voters can contact them. We'll ask the candidates for permission to post links to those prior to the posting of the official candidate statements, and will let you know when those links are available. We will also, in future elections, ask permission to post such links with the initial candidate announcement or shortly thereafter, as a regular part of our elections procedure.

[kristenmurphy.livejournal.com]

There's a new post up with links to the candidates' personal journals: http://otw-news.livejournal.com/138033.html