On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 2:26 AM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
Is vetting and scrutiny better just because there's more of it? The election process vets for some things and not for others. I appreciate the concern about capture by special interests, but can you articulate why that's more likely with outside experts? Financial and employment relationships seem to be the primary vehicle by which people imagine this capture. It seems to me that a resume-interviews-background-check approach does more to vet these issues than has historically been the case in our elections.
I worry more about special interests coming in after the fact and working out who is susceptible to influence. A person who has spent a few hundred hours working to improve a project before engaging in governance seems to me both more likely to weigh the values of the project well above his/her own personal fortune, and more likely to be wary of such influence on its face.
How is adding Board members with expertise more suitable than having a deeply trusted Board acquire and rely on a more broadly talented
advisory
board?
Because unlike the Board of Trustees, members of the Advisory Board do not have the fiduciary obligations you so rightly emphasize. Being able to bounce questions off an advisor with a financial background ...
Interesting. But the specter of fiduciary obligation alone is not enough to compel work from everyone... mistakes can be made by conflating the need for experienced staff, the need for experienced advisors, and the need for talented board members. Selecting the latter by expertise and not devotion doesn't seem right, though I understand weighing expertise in considerations.
Is there a list of skillsets currently being sought?
More details on the
advisory board will come when they are ready, but for now I'd welcome ideas - what additional areas, broadly speaking, do we need represented on the advisory board to provide useful working groups to advise the Wikimedia Foundation?
Off the top of my head: - Long-term sustainability (preparing for the future, for contingencies) - NGO & government relations (synchronizing with / inspiring new initiatives) - Education & learning (improving usefulness to / working with learners) - Music; multimedia broadly (how to better include and reach out for media) - Information analaysis & research (improving work with researchers) - Effective multilingual [internal] communication (something we continue to avoid) - Product design, marketing, and distribution (free knowledge is cool, wikipedia should help make it more so)