On Feb 1, 2012, at 2:17 PM, Risker wrote:
it gives the impression that the current three
elected members of the board are somehow considered not representative of
the movement.... It
concerns me a lot that the 97% of active Wikimedians who are not chapter
members seem to not be considered part of the movement.
Anne, my personal view is that elections capture the input of a certain
subset of our community: those editors who are fairly active and who are
interested in governance issues. That subset of our editors is an
important part of our community.
Having seats appointed by movement organizations like the chapters offers
a chance to involve of another subset of our community: those who are
interested enough in governance issues to get involved in the leadership /
decision-making of movement organizations. That's also an important subset
of our community.
But, to your point, neither of these two subsets alone nor the combination
of the two fully represents our movement. Many groups are excluded. For
example, the "silent majority" of 75,000+ active editors who haven't
historically voted in elections. Or our 475 million readers. etc., etc.,
etc.
Governance and suffrage in an online community is really, really hard. I
don't think we have the perfect system. Our current board structure was
put in place less than 4 years ago. The one thing I know is that it will
change as we try new things to make it better. I want us to continue
improving it. And I for one am open to absolutely any suggestion for how
we can do that.
I do agree that governance and suffrage is hard; however, it shouldn't
intentionally be designed to give a disproportionate representation (and
essentially double suffrage) to one subset of the community over another.
Chapter members have the opportunity to influence five seats on the Board;
those who are unable (for many variations of "unable") to be chapter
members are only able to influence three seats.
Risker/Anne