--- Brad Patrick bradp.wmf@gmail.com wrote: Different parts of
the free culture movement are more or less affected by each undertaking of the Foundation, and are of varying degrees of interest to many. I think the Foundation's mission is simply too broad to decide to govern it through direct reliance on formalized elected constituencies. Creating representation from the existing pattern of projects is also inherently political. If the Foundation is successful, the massive trend will be towards languages and projects with many fewer articles and users now, and millions more speakers and writers worldwide yet to be connected. So, there is a shift ahead no matter which way you look at it, provided the projects continue to grow as they have.
I can agree with your dislike of formalized elected constituncies. My personal dislike of them is largely logistical. What I liked about the Apache Model it is *not* a representaion model. Maybe I read it differently than everyone else, I don't know. It seemed to me perfectly scaleable and I envision it as very suitable for including new languages worldwide.
Those who are concerned about this kind of governance issue would be better served, I think, by focusing attention on board composition and expansion, as some have done. Jimmy and the other board members are of an open mind as to what the future of the board will be, what it will/should/could look like, and there is a lot of discussion about all this. We may disagree on various points for legitimate reasons, but I hope everyone agrees the conversation is healthy and beneficial to the organization.
I do not mean to ignore the near-term composition and expansion of the board by discussing this model. It is good everyone is examining the possibiliies of the future Board, but there is a great need for a larger infrastucture within the WMF (If you only edit at Wikipedia you probably do not see this need). And it is not just to know who is member or who may vote in Board elections.
The expanded Board and expanded commitees even would not solve the issues as the Apache Model would regarding communication of needs, repeatedly duplicating efforts across languages if not projects, and need for a bottom-to-top chain of authority. Authority is not the right word but when people need specific solutions they should not be coming to the top to get it worked out, but there is no other chioce right now. For example the issue of guidelines for acceptable Wikibooks. They come to this list where most people can't even fully understand the problem because you have to be familair with Wikibooks to really understand it. How many people go and investigate the Wikibooks site, and read deletion archives before giving there opinion on the matter? And were the Wikibooks editor ever actually given useful guidelines at the end of such discussion? Is any current comittee working on it for them? This could be handled in a much better fashion if there was Project Level organization.
This is what I see the Project Level Officers doing (Now all other Project Level Members are just a pool of people who can become officers and vote on officers and maybe start a no confidence vote to bring an early election, they are not some sort of Parlimentary Representatives):
*Writing and in the future reviewing blanket common policies and providing any translations neccessary through requests at the Foundation level. These policies are not adopted project-wide but are working drafts that the language communities can either adopt as is or modify to their liking.
*Keep an record of difficult project specific questions that have been asked of proffesionals (lawyers, developers, etc.) and see that they are translated for everyone's reference. At Wikisource this would include a lot of Copyright information.
*Be the help desk for any such questions or problems in the future and send difficult ones on to proffessionals at Foundation Level. I think they should also be given a token amount of attention from the Foundation for these concerns. For example if Wikisource officers decide Protect Section is a priority for Wikisource they should be given some guarantee of developer attention even though any Wikipedia related bug has triple the votes. Although this should have limits of course.
*Be the point of contact for any Foundation level comittees. Right now people seem to go to whoever is around IRC at the moment, which is not generally the most knowledgable person.
*Actively investigate language communities and keep records of their progress and make recomendations either to the community itself or any applicable Chapters that deal with that language regarding growth and promotion. This will also help indentify any innovations that can then be shared project-wide and also notice any problems at an early stage. I do not know how this would done exactly but it is needed.
*Set quality goals for the project as a whole and write reccomendations for best practices. Ensure translation of this of course. This is something that is being done well in many larger communities (i.e. en.WP's list of core topics) but smaller langs need more guidence as they have everyone busy creating content. Also the Officers could work on some kind of incentives to encourage editors to work on these quality issues.
This was really long and I didn't even talk of Foundation level stuff. But it is similar, the members are a pool of people with a low bar for entry not some kind of representatives. Just people that are willing to work on Foundation level stuff and can be appointed to commitees etc. I would imagine the Foundation basically collects money, deals with press/outside organizations, and organizes developers, lawyers, and translators. Of course the Board sets goals and trys to do what is most useful to as many projects as possible, but as of now I do not even know that they are aware what would be most useful in many cases. This model is basically much more efficent and acknowledges the reality that each project has specific concerns that are not understood by people from other projects.
Birgitte SB
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com