Delphine Ménard wrote:
On 6/15/06, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Delphine Ménard wrote:
Note that a suggestion I would do is to include amongst groups of voters, meta and chapters. This would largely tip the balance in favor of those who are *actually* working for Foundation issues.
You forget that many meta users and chapter members are *also* editors in a project or another. This could lead to people either voting twice, or having to choose sides (the project or the chapter? meta or wikipedia?)
Representing more than one project should in no way give a person two separate votes. There's nothing wrong with choosing to vote one way or the other.
We might get to something like
- Wikipedia can elect up to 30 members overall to become members
- Wikibooks can elect up to 20 ...
- Wikiquote can elect up to 1 ... (just kidding)
- Meta can elect up to 20 members
- All chapters members can elect up to 20 members
etc...
It may be that people are supported in two places. So what ? Who cares if there is no strictly fixed number ?
There is another point... You said "a good project editor does not necessarily make a good Foundation member". Yup... so what about "forcing" people to make a *choice* ? Either PMC member... or Foundation member ? The same skills are not required...
Yes, that is indeed a must-be requirement. You have to chose your battles.
Most Foundation members/councillors should be PMC members.representing that PMC. Why should people be forced to make a choice?
(as a reminder, all PMC must have 2 Foundation member on them. These 2 guys may volunteer or be appointed by board or appointed by MWF members. But only these 2 may be both on WMF membership AND a PMC).
I don't see the point of this
The *most* important point would be to very very clearly define their scope of action. They would have no particular rights as editors over the other editors for example, nor would they have the right to run/manage the local projects as "editor in chief".
This is where any model fails, coming to think of it. If the PMC's are elected by the community and have some kind of oversight granted by legal means, where does the "legal" part of their task stops and the "community mandate" starts? If those PMC's are held by community recognition, it is my belief that they will, at some point, have to make a choice.
No. In a federal system of government citizenship in the broader country is not incounsistent with citizenship in a constituent state. A PMC would be the governing body of a project. Members of that project who choose to operate outside the law need to accept the legal consequences.. Your expression "oversight granted by legal means" is unclear. In terms of legal obligations it doesn't matter how the PMCs are chosen. To maintain the separation that you mentioned before it is important to maintain the autonomy of the projects.
The big problem with Wikimedia as I see it, is that we are trying to apply something that works to build an encyclopedia (utter democracy, collaborative community decisions) to a world with different rules (legal, financial, etc.), and most of all, rules which can't really be changed with a community decision the way we change spelling or bibliography rules.
Does this need to be a problem?
The same way copy/pasting the ASF model, or the Greenpeace model, ot the US Federal model, you name it, doesn't work, copy/pasting the Wikipedia/Wikimedia projects model to the organisation doesn't work either.
We can use any of these for ideas, but ultimately it would be our own model.
Ec