Expulsions and the community bylaws

A few more points to bear in mind:

• The "Community Bylaws" under which so many of my colleagues and friends have been expelled have never gone into force. TDF statutes require that community bylaws be accepted by a vote of the trustees to go into force; no such vote was taken. I suspect our current (unelected) leadership was worried they would not win such a vote, so they just put our statutes aside and proceeded to presume to do whatever the hell they want.
• Our statutes require a procedure vis-a-vis the Board of Trustees in order to expel a member. Unfortunately, the foundation has a statutes loophole which can been misused for affecting expulsions with no formal charges, no hearing, no presentation of evidence, etc. This mechanism is an annual membership renewal. The renewal was supposed to ensure that the trustees are active contributors, not just people who were active sometime in the past and are now just holding on to their status. But - technically, as a trustee you need an annual formal approval to continue your status; and a dis-approval does not have to establish or prove that you are inactive in the community. Also, even if you've been active for years and years - you still have to undergo this every year. That means that in order to "politically assassinate" someone, or to purge an undesired group, one doesn't even need to convince a momentary majority of trustees, but it is enough to influence a few members of the "Membership Committee". And since being on that committee is not a "sexy" position, and it has a tradition of doing very little and having no accountability to the board of trustees - this manipulation is quite possible.
• ... To this we should add that a candidate MC member who had the potential to offer some resistance, and who won a seat in the last elections, was expelled before being seated: Our Board of Directors decided to disqualify this candidate _retroactively_, after the elections had already been held. Obviously, this was severe elections tampering (whether the disqualification was justified or not). This member was then purged from the TDF Board of Trustees entirely, through the very mechanism I mentioned before, of membership non-renewal.