Well, that’s why one of the proposals is a limit on consecutive terms, not a term limit period. This should improve varied membership, but wouldn’t create a need for a constantly replenishing number of potential candidates.
But will that serve to get new members into FESCo, or will it effectively make FESCo a slightly larger group of on again / off again members?
yes. this.
One thing, you’ll want to consider phasing in the “skip term”, over a transitional period to make sure you don’t drop too large a group in the first election where its in use. This is a transitional concern. Please consider scoping to “at most X number of people with the longest consecutive tenure.” This should help space out turnover over several elections during the transition. Something like X=2 or 3 might help smooth out the transition over a couple of years. You want to avoid all the initial term limits firing in the first election and dropping the majority of the members. You want to get something that looks sustainable and not something that looks bursty.
Story time,
My 120 year old curling club in Alaska implemented the “skip term” model for its board of directors at some point before I showed up. We could sit on the board for 2 consecutive terms (6 years consecutive) but then we had to sit out a term. It was useful in three ways:
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it created a space for younger club members to step up.
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it helped generational knowledge transfer, members who rolled off the board became an emeritus resource for new board members in a graceful manner, without feeling like they “lost” the trust of the membership via an election loss.
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the term off let the emeritus person re-engage as a veteran volunteer in a different way using their existing volunteer time budget.
-jef"I keep threatening people that I will do a talk about how curling is similar to open source"spaleta
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