Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
Oh, having a board is fine, so long as it only
handles unimportant
things. We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought
it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires
non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more
people. For one reason or another, Jimbo decided it would be a good
show of community participation and democratic fuzziness and whatnot if
we elected two of these five members, and so we did.
Yeah - unimportant things such as making sure we have servers and they keep
running. Unimportant things such as setting up chapters and other outreach
efforts. Unimportant things like creating a CD/printed version. Unimportant
things such as hiring an on-site server admin. Utterly unimportant things such
as having representative members with the ability to help make this all happen.
Sure - all very unimportant. "Democratic fuzziness" ?? What are you smoking?
No, the board emphatically should not handle any of those things you
listed. These are decisions to be made by the Wikimedia community, not
a committee. Top-down committee decisions are not the wiki way of doing
things.
...
I don't see how they will be open and inclusive unless the Foundation is
prepared to pay for hundreds of Wikipedians to attend them. If they
involve only a minutely small percentage of the users, then they are
worse than no meeting at all, and bias decision-making towards those
with the resources to attend.
Have you been listening? My idea is to have quarterly meetings in different
parts of the world that will hosted by a different Wikimedia chapter each time.
The trustees thus come to the users. Our elected representatives and Jimbo
should be there. The meetings will also be conducted in *real time* online via
audio/video streaming (which can be had fairly cheaply nowadays).
How are they going to come to the users? Are they going to have
thousands of meetings? It would take about 5-10 meetings in the US
alone to come within range of a decent majority of users, another 10-15
in Europe, 5-10 in Asia, and so on.
Wikipedia is
indeed a social and collaborative system, but it takes
place online, on a large scale.
So I guess you are against the idea of Wikimedia chapters as well.
No, having local chapters to make tax deductions work more smoothly is
perfectly fine.
If the
Foundation can come up with
funding so that any significant subset of its users can meet somewhere,
or even any significant subset of one of its language encyclopedias can
meet, I would not object to that. However, so far there have been no
proposals for that, only proposals for small cliques of users to meet,
which I feel is detrimental to the project on a whole. All important
work should take place online, in public, with as full participation as
possible, not take place behind closed doors and then reported after the
fact.
'Cliques' - can you be more offensive? The meetings *will* be very public (see
above). Why would you assume anything else? You are making the improper
conclusion that real world = closed door.
Real world by definition means only a small group of users will
participate in the decision-making.
As for other
comments on travel reimbursements as a good thing, one of
them even cited EU-funded projects, which are pretty notorious for being
full of wasteful perks (
http://www.iht.com/articles/521419.html among
thousands of related articles).
Perks my ass - having the elected trustees visit the people they represent
while at the same time conducting quarterly meetings are all very important.
Only so much can be done online and with computers - the human element is not
present and thus a great deal of communication is lost.
How are they going to visit the people they represent? They represent
people spread out over the entire world. Unless we are going to give
them a travel budget up in the millions, and have them spend weeks per
year travelling, that's simply impossible.
Plus, I don't really see it as "people they represent" anyway. The
people represent themselves, and ought to make the decisions themselves,
preferably through some sort of consensus-based system, with a
voting-based system as a fallback.
-Mark