Message: 9 Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:17:21 -0700 From: Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 4E939921.1010704@telus.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
On 10/09/11 9:58 AM, Risker wrote:
On 9 October 2011 12:48, Federico Leva (Nemo)nemowiki@gmail.com
wrote:
Risker, 09/10/2011 18:40:
The primary responsibility of Board members is to the Foundation, not
to
the community or the chapters or to any other external agent.
I find this response a bit odd. ;-) It almost seems to assume that the community (or Nathan?) is likely wanting to elect someone the WMF couldn't accept, or that "responsibility to the community" is a bad thing, while we used to say only that there's no imperative mandate and that chapters-elected trustees are not chapters representatives, etc.
I'm not sure what you find odd about it, but it is factual.
The key point is that board members must work on behalf of the
Foundation,
and must not act as representatives of a particular constituency, and
those
constituencies cannot direct board members elected/nominated by them to
act
in certain ways.
It's not the factuality of the statement that is odd. The Hong Kong style of democracy that insures that the elected members can never form a majority is.
In a fully democratic country all elected representatives work on behalf of the country, but they still represent particular constituencies and/or parties, to which they are accountable. Without that the entire notion of constituencies is a sham. When they fail to represent the interests of their constituencies they should be voted out.
Ray
In a real life democratic election there are certain checks and balances,
if a candidate was in jail or had recently been disqualified as a director from another organisation, then you would expect that the opposing candidates would find this out and bring it to the attention of the voters. Virtual elections don't always have the same transparency, and so it makes sense to me that for trustee elections we have the safeguard that the community nominates but the existing board can refuse to accept a nomination. However I think it would be unwise for the board to refuse to accept someone over something that was disclosed in the election, and especially if that was a difference of opinion as to the future direction of the Project rather than a bit of personal history that the candidate had persuaded most of the community to ignore.
WereSpielChequers