As I suggested, these were only friendly suggestions for an excellent piece of work. And I think your point about the community input in answer to my second is certainly a good response.

On 11-09-13 04:43 AM, James Cummings wrote:
Hi Dan, 

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 16:28, O'Donnell, Dan <daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca> wrote:
> I think the changes are very good. The only things I can see are a) the language in 
> the section about tie splitting is written quite broadly when you are actually only 
> referring to election to the board: maybe something like 'in the event of a tie among 
> candidates for election to a vacancy on the board, the succesful candidate will be 
> decided by a simple majority of continuing members of the board.'

I held off answering for a bit partly because I was on holiday and partly to see if the community had any thoughts on this. That rephrasing probably does make it clearer. We'll consider modifying it inline with this before putting it to the community for a vote.

> And b) personally, and speaking as a Canadian, I find a simple majority to be a pretty 
> low bar for proposing amendments to the bylaws--surely nobody would want to 
> proceed with a proposal that had a 5/3 split. Personally I'd recommend 6 out of 8 to 
> indicate that bylaw changes should be well considered and very consensus oriented.

And that is precisely the reason that we set the majority needed for the community vote to be two-thirds of recorded votes.  If there is a 5/3 split on whether the proposals are a good idea, taking it to the community for an RFC seems a fairly good step. (i.e. try to get feedback from the community as to whether this or that is the right thing to do.)

> I don't think it is likely to be a huge deal in practice of course. And notwithstanding
>  these suggestions, I think these are great proposals from a group that has been 
> doing great work.

Thanks!

James Cummings
Director of Digital Medievalist
Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760 Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l


--
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Professor of English, University of Lethbridge
Co-President, Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs
Co-Editor, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique
Founding Editor, Digital Medievalist