Thank you all, especially Greg, for your enlightening replies. I can see now that I've misunderstood the purpose of Permanent Members. By this excerpt from http://drupal.org/node/203039...
[Permanent Members'] main responsibility is the appointment and removal of the Directors as well as amending the statutes. In a way, they police the Board of Directors -- if they are unhappy with the Board of Directors' performance, they can appoint or remove Directors. We expect that Permanent Members spend up to two hours/week working on their Drupal Association responsibilities and obligations.
... I understood that PMs' primary purpose in the DA is to vote. However I now understand the PMs primary purpose is to contribute their skills to the DA and it's activities -- the ability to vote is an added bonus. Is this correct, or at least *more* correct? I now also understand why the application questions seemed so unusual. lol. I hope that by understanding MY misunderstanding, DA application-reviewers might better understand and manage other applicants 'sub-standard' applications. I apologize for having checked the 'I have read the statues' checkbox when I hadn't read the statutes. When I saw the length of the statues I figured the checkbox was merely a formality and legal obligation of the application, like the T&Cs for every popular website that you must agree to (but don't read) when registering. I didn't even look in enough detail to see if it was legal jargon or prose that I would have the patience to read. Thank you for correcting my miss-asumptions. At this time I think that the limited time I have for the drupal community and project is better spent in areas that probably aren't considered 'responsibilities and obligations' of a PM. (Although I'm still not really sure what constitutes valid 'responsibilities and obligations' of a PM.) I have removed my application from http://buytaert.net/applications/. I'm a little bit frustrated that I am therefore unable to vote. Although I trust that the decision to only allow DA-contributing members (PMs) to vote was made for good reasons. Thanks all! :) Bevan/