As another of the members of that committee, I'd like to echo Brad's
sentiments. I strongly urge the Board to consider a much earlier
appointment of the election committee. The one decision that was made
because of "lack of time" was the actual election model - I personally would
have supported (and did push for) more study on election models prior to
recommending to the board approval voting. In the end, we recommended
approval voting both because there was a fairly decent community history
with it and because we simply didn't have enough time to consider a move
toward another system with the inherent technology challenges.
If approval voting is the method this community wishes to remain with,
that's fine, but I didn't like that we were almost boxed into that corner by
a lack of time for deliberate study.
I urge the Board to consider appointing the new election committee fairly
soon.
Philippe
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)" <newyorkbrad(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 12:27 PM
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Future board elections
Since we are on the subject of Board elections, this
might be a good
time to restart the discussion on Meta concerning the rules and
procedures for the elections. The Elections Committee for the last
(June 2007) election (on which I served, as did Aphaia and four other
Wikipedians) was appointed very late in the process. As a result,
there was no real opportunity to discuss making any major changes to
the rules and procedures, even if members had wanted to do so. To
avoid the same situation in 2008, the 2007 committee recommended that
this year the organization of the election start much earlier, partly
for this reason and partly to ensure the best publicity, increase time
to translate the notices, etc. As it happened, from my point of view
last year's procedures worked fine and there is no need for major
changes, but that should be a conscious community decision and not
just a default one.
Newyorkbrad
On 12/29/07, Aphaia <aphaia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for your reply, Florence.
On Dec 30, 2007 12:48 AM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
I am aware this will make more difficult for all
members to meet
together and should increase costs for meetings. However, it seems to
be
a more reasonable number to welcome both community members and
outsiders, avoid putting too much constant pressure on volunteers,
provide more diversity of skills and allow room for resignations...
I've taken the point about "more reasonable number to welcome both
community members and
outsiders" (since Jan-Bart, originally
designed an outsider expert
claimed
proudly to be a part of community [cf. Board Election 2007] and another
appointed ex-life member Jimmy is even considering to run for the next
Election, this argument makes a sense, I think), "more diversity and room
for resignation". However, since all Wikimedia Board of Trustees are
volunteers, while they take many responsibilities and take care of things
in
reality not only the highest level of management, but still they are
volunteers, it is rather difficult for me to figure out how this
increment
can help avoid "putting too much constant pressure on volunteers".
Can you please give us some examples to deepen our comprehension?
Cheers,
--
KIZU Naoko
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese)
Quote of the Day (English):
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD
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