Hi everyone
You might have already noticed that the open spot for the Council Elections are not nicely balanced between the Spring and Fall elections. We currently have 5 open spots in Spring, and 2 open spots in Autumn. The Reps Peers would like to balance this (back) to 4/3 and therefore propose the following two changes:
Add the following paragraphs to https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/Council:
Dropping out of Council
Any Council member can resign from their Council seat whenever they deem necessary. Reasons are not communicated by default, the Council member is allowed to communicate these if they want to. Additionally the Module Owner and Reps Peers oversee Council members according to the criteria mentioned above and make sure Council is operational. If the Reps Peers see that someone on Council might need help, they reach out and ask how we could help to have more impact. In rare cases the Module Owner may remove Council members from their seat if no other approach has lead to improvement.
In both cases the Council member stepping out will be replaced by a new Council member. The new Council member will fulfill the full rest of the term. Example: Council member steps out of Council for personal reasons after 4 months being on Council. The replacing Council member will stay in Council for the rest of the term - 8 months.
To make sure that this is in compliance with our voting, the first person to be asked to step in will be the one Rep voted most, but not making the cut in the previous elections. If 4 spots were open, we will ask the 5th in the voting ranking to take on this new responsibility. If this person does not want to step up, it’s up to the Module Owner to decide on a replacement for the rest of the term. If the remaining time of the resigning Rep’s term is less than 3 months, the Module Owner can decide to nominate another Rep who has been on Council before to decrease the onboarding overhead.
Changes to the next election (Spring 2019):
In the next elections in Spring 2019, we have 5 open seats. Only 4 of these will be filled for a 12-month term. The 5th spot will be for 6 months only and will be replaced in the new voting in Autumn 2019. The 4 Reps with the most votes will take on the 12-month seats, the 5th ranked will be the one for the 6-month term. The 5th ranked Rep can of course re-nominate themselves in the Autumn 2019 election to stay on Council.
Spring 2019: 5 open spots (2 are still in their term)
Autumn 2019: 3 open spots (2 outgoing, 1 “half-term” from Spring 2019)
Spring 2020: 4 open spots
Autumn 2020: 3 open spots
The only change needed for the SOP for this would be an “exception” clause for the next election to introduce the “balancing out 6-month term”:
One-off “Single 6-month term” in Spring 2019 Elections
In these Spring 2019 elections we will have 5 spots open. 4 spots are for a 12-months term, 1 spot is for a 6-month term. With this we can balance out our current 5/2 open spots at elections to a more balanced 4/3 split. The reasons for desiring balanced leadership replenishment include: High level of leadership continuity and a fair distribution of workload for projects spanning across a Council members end of term.
In Sprint 2019, the Council Candidate with the 5th-most votes will be taking on the 6-months term, the others will have a normal 12-months term. The Rep serving on Council for 6 months can re-nominate themselves for the Autumn 2019 elections for a 12 month term.
What are your thoughts on this? I’ll leave this discussion open for the next ~2 weeks (until November 10th, 17:00 UTC). If there are no major concerns or feedback I will add this to the SOP as is.
Looking forward to hear your thoughts!
Michael
on behalf of the Reps Peers
