Governance Advisory Team Voting Process

This page describes the Ed-Fi Governance Advisory Team Voting Process.

Contents

The Governance Advisory Team (GAT) is responsible for facilitating Ed-Fi Governance and ensuring that the community’s input and priorities are considered. In performing this role, it is often helpful or necessary to reach a decision, recommendation or other outcome by vote. This document outlines the high-level processes and procedures for conducting such votes.

Organizational Representation

Due to GAT membership processes, some organizations may have more than one representative participating on the GAT.   To ensure decisions are made by a cross-section of the Ed-Fi community, GAT votes are counted by organization, i.e. only one vote is allowed per organization. GAT members who represent the Ed-Fi Alliance and MSDF, and support staff will not cast votes.

Process Overview

Proposals considered for a vote by GAT are presented and discussed during a GAT meeting.  At the discretion of the GAT Chair, votes are either collected synchronously during the meeting or asynchronously, or via a combination of the two methods. Each proposal voted on must have a corresponding GOV ticket on the Governance tracker board.

Voting Methods

Depending on the type of decision to be voted on, the GAT Chair may select one of the following voting methods:

1. Online Meeting Software features (e.g. WebEx chat)
2. Asynchronous survey (e.g. Google Forms)

Procedures

1. Vote elements
   1. Organization Name
   2. Name of person at casting the vote on behalf of the organization
   3. Vote - either a Yes/No or one of multiple options
   4. Additional Comments - additional optional comments will be collected and stored
2. Vote collection
   1. Synchronous votes
      1. Members cast votes (one vote per organization) during the meeting
   2. Asynchronous votes
      1. Members are given a deadline to respond, as defined by GAT Chair (e.g. one week)
      2. Vote collection is to be created and saved in the Ed-Fi Gov folder for GAT.   See here for a sample.
3. Results summary 
   1. A summary of results, which will include the number of votes for, against and abstains, or the number of votes for the options, and abstains. are added to the applicable GOV ticket. 
   2. Synchronous votes
      1. Result is summarized and presented during the meeting
   3. Asynchronous votes
      1. Result is summarized and shared either by email or at the following GAT monthly meeting

Non-voting and Abstaining

Those organizations not voting will be recorded as not having voted. 

It is also possible to abstain - i.e. formally decline to vote. In this case, data will be collected as normal, including the additional comments (e.g. which can be used to explain the decision to abstain).