[Foundation-l] GFDL Q&A update and question

[Erik Moeller]

Mike & I have made some updates to the Q&A today:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Questions_and_Answers

Please let me know or edit the page if you feel further clarifications
and answers are needed. Otherwise I'll prepare a translation request,
probably on Friday.

Meanwhile, I'm also working on the actual re-licensing proposal, so
that we can discuss it with the Board this weekend. One question I'm
struggling with, and would appreciate input on, is what voting method
and process should be used to make the decision. I anticipate that it
will be a simple yes/no vote, possibly with an explicit abstain
option. I can see two approaches to implement the actual vote:

1) Use the BoardVote software. It's secure, well-tested and
well-understood. It's more burdensome to set up, the process for
counting votes is quite rigorous (accurate but burdensome), and it may
be overkill for this purpose. Votes are private.
2) Use a vote on Meta, like we did for e.g. the Wikinews and
Wikiversity project launch votes. It's easy, but suffers from edit
conflicts, and accurate vote counting is hard. Votes are public.

In the second case, the vote result would be less defensible - but
since it's not a legal necessity to run a vote at all, that might be
OK. It would be also easier to add comments, have detailed discussions
on the talk page, etc. Importantly, since this is a complex problem,
misunderstandings may be common, and in a public vote, they could be
more easily corrected. In the first case, we could add a prominent
link to the full proposal, the Q&A and all discussions to the voting
interface, but it would still be a less wiki-like way of doing things.

I'd appreciate thoughts & comments.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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