On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Philippe Beaudette < pbeaudette@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Allow me, please, to reinforce this, wearing my "election committee member" hat.
This years' rules were mostly carryovers from last years' rules. When we started, we looked around, realized that no significant opposition to last years' rules had been expressed, checked the talk pages to be sure, and modified the rules to cover anything we thought needed to be changed (for instance, this year we were able to use edits from across wikis, using SUL - which was one of the points of opposition that was raised last year, but there was not a technically feasible method to do it at the time).
I'm sure that if there is significant response to the edit count requirement, next year's committee will happily (he said confidently, with no intent to volunteer for next year's committee) review it then.
Philippe
It should be the goal of all those who hold power to convince the populace that they must arrive at a consensus in order to change the status quo. That way those with power can more easily enact laws that appear uncontroversial and have them enter the status quo. Their power is then enhanced by the inherent difficulty in achieving a consensus, especially when the tools available for reaching consensus on general issues are brittle and difficult to use. It is further enhanced by quoting the status quo standard often, discouraging any attempts to enact change by pointing out that it would be extremely difficult to get everyone to agree since you are a mere individual.
An alternate system would, by default, put power back in the hands of the community frequently, taking advantage of the fact that technology makes it trivial to sample their voices as often as seems fair. I suppose you will tell me that I can do this - I just have to vote for a candidate for the board that agrees with my views. This is a great idea, except that I am not eligible to vote.
The WMF is a far cry from the original vision of it as a membership organization. Also, the board propagates stale laws under the notion of status quo for which the original "consensus" is no longer remembered. There is further no top down effort to ask the community if they have any good ideas, and then ask the community what they think about the best of those ideas. That, in my view, is a broken system.