DASA Governing Board 2016

Thank you to Everyone who voted!

This was the best turnout yet!

I'm proud to present to you, your governing board of 2016:

• Jason
• Riaan
• Johan
• Greg
• Lee
• Renate
• Inky

We're doing better on gender quality than last year, though there's space to do even better. It's still pretty lilly white, which we need to put some decent work into. Cape Town is super well represented and with the amazing success that was their camp as well as interesting better-attended meet-ups, very strong now.

We still have great input from previous years' board members and several people that don't stand for board seats but volunteer their time and labour regularly; So if you want to get involved in the DASA work, please remember, the DASA meetings are open to all. The board is a formality that we need, to have an NPO.

Kind regards,
Riaan

Reference: Voting Thread

A note on why we vote on GDoSA and not using some other system:

When we first started DASA we wanted to make sure that as many processes as possible are completely open to Drupalers in South Africa and are not usable by any party, even DASA board members or volunteers working on infrastructure to be used poorly or altered.

Someone in control of a site may do that, may make privileged use of contact details from a registration database, may even alter the vote. Who knows. Really, we do have good people involved, so I wouldn't expect anything like this to happen, but at the time, two years ago, the situation was different, we still had the good people that have since proven themselves as such too, but we also had sites using the Drupal name to gather contacts and publishing self-advantageous listings. We just wanted to be sure. So we decided on this super-open process. Everyone can see each vote, can verify it.

Going forward, if we had say 20 times as many votes, manual tallying will become difficult and error prone, so we may want to consider an alternative process. We have some very trustworthy people on board and we always consider people's privacy, working hard to level the playing field so we can highlight newcomers and give them every opportunity to participate and keeping processes open.

An early idea is to have a DASA Drupal website that allows sign-up, but authenticates against the drupal.org infrastructure and doesn't store personal information like e-mail addresses. We can keep the code open on GitLab and even write the voting code to push votes to a public repo too, nicely version controlled and open for inspection, tough (though not impossible) to manipulate. Any suggestions are very welcome.