Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Or, in other words: There is no power because you cannot give orders to volunteers.
This meme is oft-repeated but still untrue. Almost every volunteer organization has a hierarchy and "gives orders" to its members to some extent. Its members are, of course, free to ignore those "orders", but the organization is then free to disallow them from further participation.
Seriously, what volunteer organization can you think of where volunteers are told to just do whatever they feel like? Does the Obama campaign committee give volunteers a bunch of blank signs and say "go support Obama", or do they assign people to particular routes and ask them to follow particular rules while canvassing?
The Wikimedia Foundation may run this way, and maybe it's even a good way of running things, but it's certainly not impossible to do it any other way.
I have spent about a decade working in election campaigns, and, to repeat the "meme": You cannot give orders to volun- teers. (Besides, I see no rationale in disallowing an editor to edit article A before he has edited article B - probably you end up with no article edited at all. What would be the benefit?)
The US presidential election is a prime example: Polls show that supporters of the Democratic Party will not only cease their commitment if their favorite candidate is not nominated, they will even vote for *another* party's candi- date.
That is exactly the point I made in the post you replied to: Should the board decide against the consensus of the volunteers (editors, developers, system administrators, whatever), they will walk.
Tim