Governance

What this section is for

Governance handles three things. Tier applications — applying to become a Colaborador or Asociado — together with the Board vote that decides them. Assembly votes — the binding votes the Asociados cast on a motion, in or around a General Assembly. And the coordinator and admin role assignments that track who can do what. It is not how you become a Volunteer. Volunteer access is a separate, parallel path handled through profile setup and consent — see Onboarding.md for that flow. Tier applications never block Volunteer access, and Volunteer access never depends on a Board decision.

Both tiers run on synchronized 2-year terms that expire on December 31 of the current cycle's odd year (2027, 2029, ...), so a term granted mid-cycle is shorter than two years. An approval from October of an odd year onward, the renewal window, runs to the end of the next cycle. Terms, votes, and role assignments all leave an audit trail on your profile and on the human detail page.

![TODO: screenshot — the Board Voting dashboard: applications as rows, Board members as columns, each cell showing an individual vote, with Review/Finalize actions on the right]

Key pages at a glance

/Governance/Applications/Create — submit a Colaborador or Asociado application.
/Governance/Applications — your application status and history.
/Governance/Applications/Admin — admin list of all applications, filterable by status and tier (Board and Admin).
/Governance/Applications/Admin/{id} — admin detail view of a single application (Board and Admin).
/Governance/BoardVoting — Board voting dashboard (Board and Admin).
/Governance/BoardVoting/{id} — application detail and vote form (Board and Admin); the Finalize form is rendered only for Admin.
/Governance/Votes — every assembly vote that has been opened, open ones first.
/Governance/Votes/{id} — the motion, the live participation numbers, and your ballot if you are on the roster.
/Governance/Votes/{id}/Results — the result, once the vote has closed. Results.csv is the same numbers as a download.
/Governance/Votes/Admin — every vote in every state, including drafts (Board and Admin).
/Users/Admin/Roles — paginated list of all role assignments, filterable by role (Human Admin, Board or Admin).
/Users/Admin/{id}/Roles/Add and /Users/Admin/{id}/Roles/{roleId}/End — assign and end role assignments on a specific human (Board, HumanAdmin, and Admin).

As a Volunteer

Apply for Colaborador or Asociado

As an active Volunteer you can apply for Colaborador (active contributor with project and event responsibilities) or Asociado (voting member with governance rights). If you are already a Colaborador, you can apply to upgrade to Asociado. Both require a Board vote and grant a 2-year term on approval.

Go to /Governance/Applications/Create, pick the tier, and fill in a motivation (required) and any additional info for the Board (optional). Your current tier and access stay the same while the Board reviews. While one application is pending you cannot submit another, of any tier.

If you applied inline during initial signup, that form was a one-shot. After onboarding, /Governance/Applications/Create is the only way to apply.

See your application status

Your dashboard and /Governance/Applications show the status of any application you have submitted:

Submitted — waiting on the Board.
Approved — tier granted. You will see the term expiry date, Board meeting date, and decision note.
Rejected — the Board declined. The decision note explains why.
Withdrawn — you cancelled it.

The state history on the detail page records each change with a timestamp.

Withdraw an application

While your application is still Submitted, you can withdraw it from the application detail page. Withdrawing is recorded in the state history and lets you submit a new application for the same tier later.

Renew your tier

About 90 days before your term expires, a renewal reminder email and in-app notification go out, and a reminder appears on your dashboard. A renewal creates a new application for the same tier and goes through the normal Board vote. Board and Admin see the same upcoming expirations on the Board voting dashboard, so renewals can be prompted or processed proactively. If you do not renew before the term ends, the next hourly system-team sync removes you from the Colaboradors or Asociados system team, so you lose the access tied to that membership. Your profile's tier label is updated at the same time — back to another tier you still hold, or to Volunteer if you hold none. Volunteer access is unaffected.

Vote in an assembly vote

Assembly votes are the association's binding decisions. They are the Asociados' to make, but the Board can invite Colaboradores and sometimes every active Volunteer to cast an indicative ballot alongside them, and the list of votes is visible to every logged-in member either way.

When the Board opens a vote, everyone entitled to take part gets an email in their own language with the motion's title, the closing time, whether their ballot is official or indicative, and a link to the ballot page. An open vote also shows up in your things-to-do list and on your dashboard until you have voted.

Who is entitled is decided at the moment the vote opens, and never changes afterwards. Every current Asociado and every active Board member is on that roster with an official ballot — Board members count as Asociados here whatever their profile tier says. Depending on the motion, Colaboradores and sometimes all active Volunteers are invited too, with an indicative ballot that is labelled as such everywhere it appears and is never counted in the official result. If your tier changes while the vote is running, your place on the roster does not.

The motion is written in all six languages. One of them is marked as the official text — that is the binding wording, and the others are labelled as translations of it.

A vote is either a straight yes / no / abstain, or a ranked choice where you put the options in your order of preference. Either way you can come back and change your ballot as many times as you like until the vote closes; the page shows you your own history of changes. Abstaining counts toward turnout but is neither for nor against.

While the vote is open, the page shows everyone how many people are on the roster, how many have voted, the turnout, how many ballots have been changed, and the closing time. It shows nothing about how anyone voted — no running tally, no partial rounds, no export. That stays true until the vote closes, for everybody.

Votes close at their announced time. If the Board extends a vote, the deadline only ever moves later, never earlier.

See a result

Once the vote is closed, /Governance/Votes/{id}/Results shows the outcome: the tally or the round-by-round ranked count, whether the motion passed under its required majority (simple, or two thirds), and an acta block the Secretary can paste straight into the minutes. Results.csv is the same figures as a download. The result is computed once when the vote closes and stored — the page shows you that stored result, it does not recount each time you open it.

If a yes/no vote comes out level, the system says so and stops there: under the statutes the President's casting vote decides and the Secretary records it in the acta. Nothing in Humans breaks that tie for you.

Whether individual names appear beside the ballots depends on what the Board chose for that motion when they drafted it.

Profiles — membership tier lives on the profile and is updated automatically on approval, and again on term expiry (down to another still-active tier, or Volunteer).
Legal and Consent — the consent signing flow, independent of Board voting.
Onboarding — how a new human becomes a Volunteer. Tier applications do not replace or block this.
Teams — the Colaboradors and Asociados system teams that approved applicants join.