--- Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Congrats to all those who made up so far. I summarize.
An organisation with
- a board
- members (ASF members)
- aside committees (event, public relations etc...)
ASF Members elect the board.
A collection of projects, whose participants elect ASF members.
Each project has a governing committee in charge, on which there are at leasts 2 ASF members, and which report to the board of the ASF.
Comments ?
Ant
Personally, I really like this model a great deal. I like it much better as it is here than with any of the modifications which have already been proposed. This really could work easily without major elections in most cases. I think we should keep it as simple as possible. Start off with all current buearucrats being Project Members ask them to immediately nominate one(?) other person from where they are a bueruecrat and two(?) people from a language too small to have a buerucrat. That is the seed membership which should allow initial elections of officers and voting on basic bylaws etc. From then on any Project Member can nominate anyone to join as in Apache, also future buearucrats do not automatically become members. Once that is setup we begin to worry about how to seed the Foundation Memebership. I think that Foundation Membership should be drawn from Project Members and Chapter Members pretty much exclusively without "making a choice" of which membership card one person can carry. Although I do not think *officers* at the Project Level should hold any position on Foundation Level commitees at the same time, I do not see a problem with an officer being simple voting Foundation Member. Nor do I see a problem with Foundation Committee members being simple voting Project or Chapter Members. I imagine the Foundation Membership would be pretty self-balancing. If for example the Foundation Membership begins to be over weighted with Wikipedia Project Members the Chapter Members and other Non-pedia Project Members could easily put a stop to more Wikipedia Projects Members being confirmed and confirm people from other areas to restore balance.
As to concerns that smaller languages will be left out, and that they have different issues. I think the first can be easily avoided as so many people strongly believe in promoting smaller languages. Honestly can they be more left out in this new system than they are now? That they face different challenges according to size is even more reason to keep them together so they can learn from each other. A place were RC can be checked by hand will one day grow, and to learn in advance how to deal with libel on a larger project can only be a benifit. The problems faced at a smaller languages can find many suggestions from those who have already "been there and done that". But I think the Project Membership (especially non-pedia ones) will be as concerned with common technical issues as legal or procedural ones. Besides that there are many issues that *do* scale. How to encourage people to work on core topics, instead of pet projects for example. There could always be a backdoor built in to allow the Board to appoint people from un-representented languages to Project Membership if a complaint comes up through the Chapters. But I do not think it would come to that.
Birgitte SB
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