Brian wrote:
Speaking of consensus, where can I find the consensus for severely restricting the number of people who can vote by an arbitrary rule, and where is the consensus for the particular rule? You make it clear that The Powers That Be sit around a coffee table and pick whatever they think is best. In the absence of such a consensus the default would be a more permissive voting system.
Actually, the general case with Wikimedia, at least from my experience, is that consensus are required to make a major change, not to maintain the status quo. Having an edit requirement of some form *is* the status quo, as I pointed out in my earlier email.
Anyway, that's not how things work with the board election for WMF anyway. At the end of the day, despite what we might want, WMF is not a membership organization. And who get to be on the board is determined by its bylaws. The bylaws, which may be updated any time by the board states "The Board of Trustees shall determine the dates, rules and regulation of the voting procedures, which, beginning in 2009, shall take place in odd-numbered years. The Board shall determine who is qualified to vote for community-selected Trustees.".
In practice, the board delegating this responsibility to a number of community members who forms the election community, while of course maintaining final approval / veto power over the committee's decisions.
And from experience, I can tell you the reality of establishing the rules work by starting from last year, and updating or modifying based on feedbacks. And that mean, given no strong community consensus to change our present form of requiring some form of edit requirement, having that requirement.
KTC