Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
valdelli@bluemail.ch wrote:
The community could accept only representative members voted with normal procedure.
Of course.
But community vote is not the only way to get board members. We have some very good board candidates who are not famous in the community and who could bring to the table professional expertise that we greatly need, but who would not put themselves through the troll wars of an election.
This sounds reasonable, although I think they're not entirely different things, if we're speaking in an informal sense (which is really what will dominate community-board relations more than the formal setup will). It's possible, for example, that there are people who would actually prevail in an election, but are deterred from running because of the election process. If they were appointed, those people could be said in some tea-leaf-reading sense to actually represent the community. Then there are gradations---people who wouldn't actually win an election, but who are generally respected and don't engender much objection; then unknown people; and finally people who are actively disliked by a large segment of the community.
We could try some variation on some of the consensus-style methods we tend to use on the encyclopedia. For example, solicit nominations, possibly in private, and then privately contact the people nominated to ask if they'd accept a position if chosen. Then make a (public) list of potential candidates, and solicit feedback on them, possibly privately-expressed feedback so people don't have to publicly attack anyone. Then appoint the people who have reasonably good consensus support. Assuming the feedback is indeed expressed in private, and the list is more than a handful of people, those not selected shouldn't really be negatively impacted (not being selected for 2 slots out of a list of, say, 15 isn't particularly bad).
This is a little trickier than the way we do it on articles, because to avoid public flamewars and driving people off, much of it would have to be done in private communications, and therefore the decision of what constitutes consensus would have to be made by whoever reads those emails. It could be the current board, or someone they designate. Technically/formally, that would essentially be the board appointing new members itself, but if you five agree to follow some rough community consensus in making those appointments, I'm pretty sure you're not going to actually lie to us and claim someone had consensus support when they didn't, even if we have no way of verifying that.
Anyway that's a pretty off-the-top-of-my-head outline of how to design a system that merges community consensus and sensitivity towards potential members who aren't politicians, so I'm sure there are better ways of doing it. I do think some sort of balancing of those goals is necessary, though.
-Mark
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Bah.
In other words we must allow the current stacked Board to stack the future Boards to get the desired responsible, effective, expert Boards.
This begs the question ..... if a stacked Board is the best way to attract the skills and participation needed to effectively manage our communities then why is there a lackluster interest for volunteers with the expertise to participate in current community management activities?
A bigger stacked Board micromanaging the community will leave us in the future right where we are now.
regards, lazyquasar