On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 8:58 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
I'm happy with S/N/O and with the election winners, but concerned about the diversity of the Board. I wonder if rethinking the entire board structure is in order, for example we could have:
- One seat per continent, elected by the whole voting community
- Two affiliate seats chosen by all affiliates including user groups.
- Two appointed seats with non-renewable terms.
Thoughts?
That's interesting, though I'd have some additions: 1) Not continents, but global cultural areas (i.e. not South America, but Latin America; not Asia, but likely Mid East + North Africa, South Asia, East Asia...). 2) Three, if we add user groups? 3) +Jimmy :) But I'd also object on non-renewable terms. Stu and Bishakha for a long time and Jan-Bart for the most of the time were the main sources of stability inside of the Board.
At the other side, I am thinking that we should switch from electing the Board, to electing the Assembly, which would select the *Executive* Board (which should be paid). ~50 members of the Assembly wouldn't be that big financial pressure, even they would meet two times per year.(~3000 participants of Wikimania; few hundreds of Wikimedia Conference; and it's not likely that Assembly members would be too much different from those who participate in those two events).
That would definitely raise participation and empower trusted members of our community. In that case, we could make elaborate quotas, like "at least 40% of women", "at least 5% per region" etc. It's hard to do that with three elected members.
I think we'd be ready for that if not in 2017, then definitely in 2019/20.