On 6/19/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Larry Lessig - head of Creative Commons Mitch Kapor - head of Mozilla Foundation (Firefox), founder of EFF, and extremely passionate about the Wikipedia mission (and he edits Wikipedia, and he is absolutely fascinated by and supportive of our community model) Richard Stallman - needs no introduction Eben Moglen - main legal mastermind of the FSF
These are the obvious American free culture / free software representatives. As I've said before, we need to think carefully about what we are trying to achieve. If this is for the purpose of fundraising and expression of mutual respect (I know you are on the CC board already), then an Advisory Council would do just fine, and would allow us to put an arbitrary number of people there.
Would I want Eben Moglen, RMS or Larry Lessig to vote on our copyright policies, or on what new project to approve, or on what personnel to hire? Most likely not. Would I want Mitch Kapor, a key advocate of Mozilla's current corporate approach, to vote on whether Wikipedia should allow advertising? Definitely not. Nor do these people bring truly different perspectives to our organization that we do not already have. In other words, we do not have to search much in our community to find people who think exactly like RMS. Yes, they are crucially important in the movements they represent. But we are already well known and well established in that scene.
Please review the typical descriptions of non-profit Board responsibilities, e.g.: http://www.idealist.org/if/idealist/en/FAQ/QuestionViewer/default?section=03...
Note that I believe Wikimedia is substantially _different_ from typical non-profits, so any standard recipes do not apply. However, the responsiblities of the Board are fairly clear, and in our context, the Board -- even with a decreased role in day to day governance -- has a very substantive role in defining the future of our project. Deciding to literally give a share of that future to an outsider is a very serious move. Much more serious than, say, removing an inactive trustee from the Board.
If you go down the route of appointing a substantial number of outsiders, at the very least you should consider delegating a subset of that authority and responsiblity to an Executive Committee. But I don't see a strong reason to do this in the first place, and none has been put forward. What are the reasons we need RMS, Lessig, or Moglen on our regular governing Board?
Again, if you want fresh thinking on the governing Board, and people who actually participate, then I think we need to look in the worlds of - access to knowledge in the developing world - eLearning and ICT skills development - academia and education - languages, internationalization, localization - freedom of speech (think Chinese Wikipedia) - digitization, archiving and metadata - ...
These are areas which are not truly represented in our current group, nor can we easily find experts here in our community. They are, however, critical to the success of our organization. Again, I am not convinced we need these people on the governing Board, but I'd prefer someone who _doesn't_ have a strong, preformed opinion on many of the copyright and policy questions that will come up.
A group of only Americans would be regrettable. If you, in spite of my objections above, want people from the free software / free culture community, you might consider people like [[Georg Greve]] (FSF Europe), [[Volker Grassmuck]] (Wizards of OS organizer, has written an excellent book about free software / free culture), Markus Beckedahl (Netzwerk Neue Medien, very involved with Creative Commons), [[Konrad Becker]], someone from FFII.org, someone from CCC e.V., ... there are lots of possibilities. Jean-Baptiste should be able to come up with a few other good Euroepean suggestions, but I'd also like people from the developing world in particular.
Erik