Discussing 'what if' scenarios in public rarely does any good if those same people have full power to avoid that scenario in the first place. Both the community and the board can avoid the sitation that we don't reach agreement. Therefore, discussing 'what if we don't, what will you do' will most likely not improve the arguments, discussion or outcome for anyone, but only makes that very scenario more likely to happen. Let's cross that river when we get there.
The same goes for the very theoretical 'the board might not accept a board member nomination'. No such situation happened ever in the history of the foundation, quite the contrary - they have sometimes appointed people who ended on the nomination list lower than required *as well* (for example Oscar). I don't see any reason why that should happen any time soon, so perhaps discussing that would be a theoretical exersize - very interesting but hardly productive to this specific discussion.
What would be very constructive for me is getting more hard data which we can use to have the discussion we need to have. Getting more data about how our readers think about the topic for example. On whether the difference in opinion is mainly geographical, related to education/background or to hair color - whether the community (as has been suggested by some) consists of a biased group of authors or that this is actually quite representative for their regions. No conclusions can be drawn automatically from that, but it would help us in getting to the core of the discussion, and also in figuring out if there would be a system (filter or not) that both would help resolve the issues people see, and not obstruct others.
The civil war scenario sounds horrible, but when I read some discussions, it seems some people are all too eager to steer into that direction, hoping that 'the others' will steer away first. Perhaps we should just slow down a bit and map the situation a bit better.
Best regards,
Lodewijk
No dia 9 de Outubro de 2011 19:05, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com escreveu:
On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 12:40 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Two board members are selected by chaptersl however, the board has
certain
rights to refuse the selected candidates. Chapter-selected candidates
will
be appointed in 2012.
The WMF-wide community holds an election in odd-numbered years to
nominate
three candidates. Again, the board has certain rights to refuse the candidates with the most votes.
The remainder of the board members are selected for their expertise, with the exception of the "Founder" seat which is approved on a regular basis.
The primary responsibility of Board members is to the Foundation, not to
the
community or the chapters or to any other external agent.
This is all available for review in the Bylaws.[1]
Risker/Anne
Thanks!
To your last point; that's of course true for any corporation. Yet, it seems clear and obvious in this case that the Board can't serve the Foundation without also serving the Wikimedia community. If the Board loses the support of the community, not only will that have election repercussions (despite the ability of the Board to determine its own membership), it will also be strongly detrimental to the interests of the corporation.
I'm sure the Board understands that you can't please the readers at the expense of the editors, particularly when we're at a point in project development where editors are not so easy to replace. Just like editorial decisions happen in the real world and have real world consequences, so also will Board decisions have consequences.
Now all this is not to say that the Board has already lost the confidence of the community, or that any specific members should be turned out or anything like that. But it's worth remembering, for folks on both sides of this issue, that there are methods of addressing any truly schismatic decisions on the part of the Board in the hopefully very unlikely case that any are taken.
Nathan
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