2017-02-09 17:00 GMT+01:00 Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com>:

One issue: membership.

== Membership ==

* Accepting any new member would still require consensus of those who
expressed their opinion. (Nothing has changed.)

* LangCom members should read messages in a timely fashion (at least
twice per week), and to contribute on such decisions, where
appropriate, within the deadline, or otherwise presumably at least
once per month (this could be a simple +1). Lapses in participation
would result in a "warning" after three months, and revocation of
membership after six. (Note: This is actual proposal for the policy
change!)

This makes sense, no objections. I must say, there are many times I could've replied with just a +1, but didn't because I didn't have anything more to contribute to a conversation, but I realize even an "I agree" adds some value in this list, since it shows that what's being written is read and understood. I'll keep that in mind forward.

* At this moment of time we have 17 members. One of them has very
specific role (Zadiak, Wikiversity). I don't remember if I heard at
all three of them. Five of them are quite quiet during the last few
years.

There are some members I think we could safely remove already, I'll list them and why in the bottom of this email.

While it's good to create a general limit of 10-15 members, I think it
is not useful at the moment, as we don't have all necessary expertise
inside of the committee. However, on the long run, we could limit
accepting new members from already covered areas.

+1 :-)

In relation to Wikimedia and computers in general we are pretty strong
and I see no reason to increase the number of LangCom members based on
those types of expertise.

However, we lack in expertise and connections related to, most
importantly, South (and Central) America and Southeast Asia (including
Austronesian languages). It would be good to have somebody for the
languages of New Guinea (~1500 of them).

This might be nitpicking, but I don't necessarily agree that we should be looking for New Guinea language specialists. Yes, I'm aware that there are 1500 languages (¼ of the world's languages by some estimates) spoken in New Guinea, but I don't think it makes sense for us to be giving too much weight to that at this point. The vast majority of these languages are spoken by small tribes who live in the middle of the forest, often lack access to basic amenities, let alone the Internet, and whose languages have never been written before. (I'm generalizing broadly now, and am no expert in Papuan languages, so please correct me if I'm mistaken!) This is not to say I wouldn't welcome any Papuan language specialists, I just think it doesn't make sense to make that a priority for an Internet-based movement like ours. But anyways, this is not very related to the point of this thread.

I would also like to see a little bit of ethnnolinguistic diversity
inside of the committee. At the moment we are 16/17 native
Indo-European speakers and just two members are not of European
ancestry. In other words, I think another African member should be
welcome, as well.

Yes, please.

My proposal (so, please, comment this paragraph if you don't agree or
you want to make addition or change!) is to publish on wikimedia-l
that we are searching for three member profiles, which should be,
ideally, similar to Oliver: (1) A Wikimedian and expert in South and
Central American indigenous languages; (2) A Wikimedian and expert in
Southeast Asian (including Austronesian) languages; (3) A Wikimedian
and expert in New Guinea languages.

That would raise the number of LangCom members to 20 and from this
point of time, we should wait to lose at least 7-8 members before
adding any new.

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List of LangCom members I think we should consider removing right away for prolonged inactivity:

* Antony D. Green, last edit on Meta in 2013, last post to the mailing list in 2015

* Bèrto 'd Sèra, last edit on Meta in 2008, last post to the mailing list in 2008

* Karen, no current account on Meta, last post to the mailing list in 2014 (before that one in 2013, then quite a bit of emails from 2007–2010)

* Maria Fanucchi, last edit on Meta in 2008, last post to the mailing list in 2008

* Shanel, last edit on Meta in 2014, last post to the mailing list in 2011

mvh

Jon Harald Søby