ESEAP Hub/Governance/ESEAP Preparatory Council/Meeting Notes/08: 9 February 2024

The following document is the meeting minutes taken during a meeting. Please discuss the document on the talk page. With exception for grammatical and other minor corrections, please do not alter the document without seeking consensus from the participants of the meeting on the talk page.

ESEAP Preparatory Council Meeting #8

Monday, February 19 2024

Attendees:

Johnny
Belinda
Reke
Irvin
Robert

Support

Joyce
Kaarel

Agenda

Elections for the Congress

Discussion

Election model for the Congress - in-person or virtual

Importance of the commitment of the members
It is important for the nominees to be present at the convention
There is a strong concern about not everyone being able to participate in-person, which creates barriers
Ideally the number of Council members 9 seems to be an ideal number
An idea of the show of hands for voting for the congress
Idea to include people who applied for the scholarship for the conference
Online procedure last time around was really messy regarding the governance aspects
If the online votes would be considered, it needs to be very strict
Congress can finalize the structure
It would also need to be decided when the nominations start
Suggestion to have subsections of the region to select their seats
With the limit of 29 seats there needs to be a decision on how new affiliates will be brough to the system
The model needs to also accommodate the switching Summit and Convention models now decided for the ESEAP
What we need to achieve is a credible election for the Congress and selection process for Council selection
There needs to be proper consensus regarding the bylaws between the preparatory council, because this is the body tasked to set the bylaws up
There is not much sense to extensively rewrite what was decided in Kuala Lumpur with a good majority in the vote
There will be many questions around voting, to anticipate
It is difficult to see what the other options for voting could be
Implications of the in+person assembly is that the seats would need to be guaranteed and they would take up a lot of participant seats

From the chat:

The definition of stakeholders is not clear and now falls into three categories. The Language Project wishes to determine whether project like "XYZ Language Wikiversity" can appoint administrators to attend. Additionally, two other categories lack reasonable definitions and require assistance from everyone.
Suggestions are needed for the rights and obligations of stakeholders.
During the Kuala Lumpur discussions, the number of Congress seats was fixed at twice the number of affiliates minus one. We need to consider in advance the issue of Congress seats being too high, making elections or holding meetings difficult.
The functions of the Council currently emphasize responsibilities. Irvin suggests setting more proactive goals and hopes to propose ideas.

The down side of only actual participants are eligible to participate, there will be imbalance representation depending who is the host country.

Perhaps the process should not be the same, like actual editing of the Meta page.

Affiliates (fixed number to be changed after 2 years), Individuals (fixed number, a seat less than that of the Affiliates) Are self-funded individuals welcome in Kota Kinabalu or in the next ESEAP Conferences held every other year?

I asked in line with the suggestion that to consider those who are attending are the eligible voters/be part of the Congress. By laws is only amended by the general constituents/stakeholders during ESEAP Conference.

We won't have a problem with the Affiliate Seats as they are represented in Kota Kinabalu. Only the individual seats can be problematic. Individual Seats nomination and election can be done before the Conference.