On 9/1/11 5:37 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
On 8/28/11 1:00 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
I think that developing such a legal entity should be a high priority for Brazilian Wikipedians to ensure that Wiki activities in Brazil are controlled by Brazilians. At the same time I don't think there is any value to having a WMF appointee on your board; such a person would find it difficult to function under circumstances of perpetual conflict of interest. No other chapter has such a clause.
I had never thought of this before, but now that it has been mentioned, I just wanted to disagree, quite respectfully because Ray is awesome of course, and say that I think it is a very interesting idea to have a WMF appointee on the boards of chapters.
There should be very few cases where there is a "conflict of interest" since chapters and the Foundation are deeply tied together always (and that's a good thing). I think having a Foundation representative on the board of chapters does present some possibly insurmountable logistical issues (who will they be?) but I actually think such an arrangement might be incredibly valuable for improving communication and *decreasing* perceived conflicts of interest.
--Jimbo
Beside the excellents points raised by my collegues ...
I cannot wait to see the WMF representative learn the local language to be able to communicate with the chapter board members
... or for WMF to pay a translator in 30+ languages to do real time translation of board meetings, operational reports translation, real time general assembly discussion translation....
AHAHAHAHA
Florence