Anthere wrote:
Jan Kulveit wrote:
One dissimilarity - what are the "projects"? In the sense of ASF it may be Wikipedia, Wikinews, Commons, etc. Here the projects are language versions of "meta-projects". Commiters have common languages - code and English. Wikimedia projects do not. You can hardly effectively oversight a Wikimedia project if you dont understand the language. => question - if you take board members and their freinds, and maybe even theirs friends, does it cover the spectrum of Wikimedia languages? I would guess it doesn't.
If course it does not... I would be tempted to say that Wikimedia projects are the projects (so, Wikipedia, Wikinews etc...), rather than by breaking down to language. Why so ? Because even if they have a different language, the various language versions share the same goals (or precisely *should* share the same goal), the same needs and the same threats.
A direction of thought would be to examine to areas of authority of the PMC. Here are my suggestions
- ensuring all projects are following the same goal
This is really a question of how detailed the goal will be. The goal of building an encyclopedia is general enough, as is ensuring NPOV, but once you get away from general pronciples and start to micromanage the whole thing will fall apart. As the goals become more detailed ensuring should not depend imply enforcing.
- overseeing tm issues (the project logo, the project tm, domain names...)
- overseeing the general threats facing this particular project (legal
threats faced by wikiquote are definitly different from those faced by Wikipedia)
- overseeing the licencing issue of the project (note that this
naturally occured when wikinews chose another set of licensing... for all language version wide)
- oversee technical needs (wikiversity or wiktionary needs are specific
to a project, not to a language version)
etc...
Naturally, the PMC can not cover all languages version. But if that committee has 20 members (for example), I guess they will always cover more languages than the current board ;-)
PMCs are not needed for all projects in all languages. A small language project may do quite well with a one man governance model, and may very much benefit from that even if that person has dictatorial tendencies. However, as these projects grow applied governance models should grow with them until they are big enough to need a full-scale PMC
Another dissimilarity is in the existence of local chapters. How do they fit in the above scheme?
I do not see why local chaters would get a specific involvement in the PMC scheme. They could get involved in the membership scheme by also having up to a certain number of representative on the Foundation.
Some level of chapter involvement in both the Foundation and PMCs is lkely desireable, but for different reasons. At the Foundation level they would participate in co-ordinating responses to the legal situations in each country. At the project level they could would likely help to co-ordinate issues relating to national dialects. In French it would make sense if Canadian, Belgian and Swiss chapters were represented on the PMC for each French language project.
Ec