Hey,
interesting take - will think on this.
If we accept that there might be a duality, the points made in the
video could help. Perhaps it might be intersting to look into
this as a possible solution (see Council of Stellar Management -
CCP/EVE Online) and get over the bi-polar phase (simplification:
anarchistic with attributes of a collective on the one side to use
your characterisation and legal entities on the other) to a truly
multi-polar community with equal partners...
And it's important to get the community integrated in a more
formal way into decision making processes... something like the
Chapter Dialogue by Nicole, the voting idea for the wikimedia
engineering team by gryllida or the "steering group" for software
dev proposed by Anders might be a great tool for regular feedback
and participation (?!) - interesting times.
That said, we are again at the "duality" that Gerard said does not
exist. His last post detailing his thoughts on the community are
rightly characterising the volunteer part of the community as an
ever-changing ad-hoc group while not taking into account the form
of the WMF and the organisational legal forms of local chapters
as hierarchically structured legal entities with charters clearly
stating a pre-defined goal (etc). This weakens the characterisation of
the wikipedia family in it's entity as a collective (changes of
objectives common in collectives are either not possible or too wide
to be achievable).
Further, the legal documents of the local legal entities also have to
state a clear purpose, voting proceedings and more, which might be
used to find out what people want and what they would agree to, if
community voting by users does not have enough representational force
in his or Magnus' opinion (Magnus' argument being that the numbers are
too low to truly represent the community).
These points should be adressed or at least defined e.g. what a
possible representative majority of the users should be (magnus uses
edits for example).
Cheers,
gh
Thursday, August 28, 2014, 9:28:02 PM, you wrote:
Hi all,
I just saw this nice video on Why ordinary people need
to understand power
<http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_liu_why_ordinary_people_need_to_understand_power#_=_>,
by Eric Liu, from Citizen University
<http://www.citizenuniversity.us/>.
Although my personal interest goes beyond the
wiki-world scope, I'd like to
recommend this video for it covers some important subjects that might be
related to some tensions we see so often in the Wikimedia movement (WMF vs.
volunteers, Chapters vs. WMF, online vs offline volunteers, lack of
leadership at some crucial moments and places, tirany of the
structurelessness
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness> etc.).
Thoughts welcome.
Tom
--
Best regards,
; mailto:box@gmx.at