[Foundation-l] Volunteer Council - A shot for a resolution

[Samuel Klein]

Milos,

I am a bit baffled by your posts, not because I disagree with them,
but because I don't understand the discussion and deliberation process
you have in mind.

>  If someone wants to participate in decision-making process which is of
>  common interest, they should know the common language at least at some
>  basic level (clear "Tarzan English" is good enough for communication).

no English means no participation?  That part I definitely disagree with.

>  When I was thinking about a large body, I was thinking about a virtual
>  body. Maybe, some day in the future, when WMF would be able to pay
>  trips for the whole body annually, it would be able to meet somewhere,

This strikes me as a costly idea, whether or not it is WMF paying for
the affair.  Define something that scales from the beginning --
everyone participating in a meeting organizes a local gathering in
some fixed way, and joins in from around the globe -- and spend
whatever monies would have been wasted on fuel, providing true
education, outreach, and long-term security.


>  The other issue (which I described at the talk page) is that even if
>  we say that all languages should have one representative and to give

How about all languages having as many representatives as want to and
have time to participate?  What is the advantage of shutting people
out?  Please help me understand a single use case in detail.


>  So, the job of the Provisional Council should be to create a plan for
>  adopting more members into the Council and how it would be
>  implemented.

Since we're already talking about this with some relish, how about
making this the jof of People Who Care About The Idea, without waiting
for the bureaucracy and lossy intermediation of setting up a
provisional council?


>  - The first elected representative should be consisted of 1
>  representative for every project type (Wikipedia, Wikinews, Commons,

How about "at least 1, and as many as are interested and able"?
Unless you mean for this to be a body dedicated to numerical voting...


>  - The first elected body should have two working bodies:
>  self-regulation body and community-regulation body...

Community regulation : how would this be a good thing?  Community
advice and enlightenment sounds more interesting and less
controversial.

>  - The second elected body should have NPOV policy and NPOV
>  implementation body...
>  - The third elected body should have encyclopedic policy and
>  encyclopedic implementation body...
>  - When NPOV and encyclopedic bodies become stable enough they should
>  form independent Content Council...

I don't know what to say to this.   These are things that every
community member on every project participate in now.  Why would you
want to disempower them?


>  The other (I think very) relevant issue here is that we would get a
>  few hundreds of persons who are deeply involved in building our global
>  community. And they would do that *together*.

It seems to me we already have thousands of people deeply involved...
what does 'building our global community' means to you? What would
this closed community of hundreds be involved in that the current open
community is not?


>  While community members have responsibility to only one real side (WM
>  committee is responsible only to the Board), we wouldn't have enough
>  people enough motivated to work on building the global community. When
>  responsibility is two-sided (Council itself and community which
>  delegated a member), I am sure that all sides would be much more
>  motivated to keep the community in a good direction.

Now you've lost me :-)  Please elaborate...


Cheers,
SJ