Announcement of 2021 GOSH Community Council

Hi everyone!

As the 2021 GOSH Election Secretary, I want to start off by thanking all of our great candidates for helping us realize the first GOSH Election. The candidates upheld the values of GOSH, bringing their own unique perspectives to the election, and acted as great stewards of this community.

Our wonderful independent observer Ankita (@sudokita) and I have tabulated the votes, and we are excited to announce the 2021 GOSH Community Council!

We had 58 registered voters, and 45 votes were cast between May 21st and May 31st. The STAR voting platform performed well, and made it very straightforward to identify the seven winning candidates.

In order to make the seated community council as equitable and representative as possible, a minimum of 4 candidates who self-identify as one of the following groups will be seated. In this election, the minimum requirement was met, with 6 sitting Community Council members identifying as one or more of these groups. Of the 14 candidates who ran, 13 identified as one or more of these groups.

As a reminder, the GOSH governance plan states that the 4 elected candidates receiving the highest scores will be seated for 2-year terms, and the 3 remaining elected candidates will be seated for 1-year terms. This is done in order to ensure a balance of continuity and healthy turnover across annual elections.

Introducing the 2021 GOSH Community Council:

Council members that will be seated for two years:
Julian Stirling @julianstirling
Laura Olalde @laola
Pierre Padilla-Huamantinco @biomakers_lab
Pen-Yuan Hsing @hpy

Council members that will be seated for one year:
Andrew Quitmeyer @hikinghack
Maria Frangos @mariafrangos
Liz Barry @lizbarry

The Governance Working Group will be reaching out to new Community Council members to schedule a set of handoff discussions, and we will make sure to keep everyone updated on that process.

As this was the first-ever election, we will also be planning a community retrospective in collaboration with the Community Council to explore how we can make future elections smoother and more equitable.

We want to thank all the candidates who ran, as we know this was a substantial undertaking. We have been deeply gratified by the community response and participation.

Congratulations to the newly elected Community Council! Members of the GOSH community have chosen you for their first community council, and we look forward to what you will achieve going forward.

Thank you,
Bri Johns
On behalf of the GOSH Governance Working Group

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Hey congratulations to all the new members of the Council!

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Congratulations everyone :clap: :clap: :clap:
Including to those who were not elected this time around, your work for the community is greatly valued.

Thanks to the governance working group for their months of hard work to get to this point, to @brianna for doing an extremely efficient job as Election Secretary and to @sudokita for joining as the independent observer. It’s great to see GOSH taking this first step to a more transparent way of making community decisions.

The upcoming retrospective will hopefully give an opportunity to tweak the process to further improve representation from the whole GOSH community and I’m excited for what comes next :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Jenny

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Thank you very much to each of you for this opportunity and for your trust :slightly_smiling_face:.

I hope we continue to work side by side and grow our community! It is an honor for me to collaborate in this collective construction.

Congratulations to all colleagues and a special thanks to @briannaljohns and @sudokita for organizing and observing the process!

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Congratulations to all the Council members!

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Thank you so much @briannaljohns, @sudokita, the current Governance Working Group, and especially the whole GOSH Community for making this election the success that it is. :pray: I am genuinely humbled by the chance to serve this community! I shall do my best to listen and involve the diverse talents and backgrounds of everyone in GOSH to take this unique international community forward.

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Ni! Minhas saudações e felicitações aos novos membros do conselho da comunidade! =D

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