[native-lang] Community Contributor Representative Election!

All,

Nominations are now open for candidates for the Community Contributor  
Representative (CCR) to the Community Council.  Nominations will  
commence immediately, today, 10 June 2005 and last for one week,  
ending 17 June 2005.

* What is the CCR? He or she is the at-large community representative  
to the Council, which is OOo's governing body. The Council (also  
called CC) sets policy, resolves disputes, and so on.  The CCR would  
ideally present issues to the CC that the community at large finds  
important, as well as otherwise help the community get its voice  
heard by the Council.  The term is for 6 months (more or less) and  
there is not that much work required, no more than a few hours a  
month, mostly for IRC meetings and e-mail discussions.

* Who is eligible? Any registered member of OpenOffice.org who has  
demonstrated a commitment to the project and is known by the  
community but is not an Accepted Projects lead or co-lead.  (Accepted  
Projects are those listed at <http://projects.openoffice.org/ 
accepted.html>).  A good candidate would be someone who can advocate  
on behalf of endusers but who is also (at least minimally) informed  
of the technical and logistical issues involved in producing  
OpenOffice.org.

The position can be interesting and even fun.  Meetings are seldom  
boring and you do get an insight into how OOo is governed.  There are  
a lot of policy issues coming up and this is your chance to affect  
their outcome.

* How do we proceed?  The charter creating the Council is fairly  
clear. (See http://council.openoffice.org/CouncilProposal.html)  The  
various project leads select 2-3 candidates from the names submitted  
by the community.  The candidates are then voted on by the community.  
"Community" means registered OpenOffice.org members.

Here are the groundrules for the process:

* It's a two-week, three-step process.

     • Seven days to obtain nominations from the community, three (or  
so) days for the leads to select candidates, four days for voting on  
the candidates. Voting will be done via the Web.

* All nominees must be registered OOo members.

* You may nominate yourself.

* No campaigning.  If you are not already known by the community,  
then you probably ought not to consider standing for election.

* Send a brief (75 word) abstract stating who you are and what you do  
for OOo to [email protected].  After discussion by the  
project leads, we will post the ones selected to the Council homepage  
(<http://council.openoffice.org/>) and post notices to  
[email protected], [email protected],  
[email protected], [email protected], dev@native- 
lang.openoffice.org, and [email protected], and ask that  
all Project Leads inform their communities of the election.

* If elected, congratulations! :-)  The next Council meeting will be  
held in July. After that we will try to adhere to a fortnightly (once  
every two weeks) schedule.

Cheers,
Louis

PS Note that this is but one of several other elections being run  
concurrently.

--
Louis Suarez-Potts
Community Manager
OpenOffice.org