2009/1/8 Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net:
- A person at the Foundation level who has true, sensitive inter-personal as
well a inter-group skills, and who would keep a close eye on the Project looking for impasses when they arise. The person would need to be objective and lobby-resistant ;-). This would be the person of absolute last resort in settling community-confounding problems.
Aside from section 230 concerns, my primary concern about the appointment of any single person to such a role would be scalability across languages and projects. I continue to believe that the idea, proposed I think by GerardM, to have a Meta-ArbCom as an institution of last resort for dispute resolution could be very helpful, and easier to get off the ground than any kind of general council.
*This is more of a cultural issue: I would like to see the more established members of the community be more open to criticism and dissent from within the community.
To me, this is synonymous with openness to systemic change in general. Wikipedia[n]s tend to become resilient against systemic change as policies and practices become established and entrenched. To some extent this is necessary to serve the mission of the project. In other cases it's debatable: e.g., is a predominantly deletionist community "better" or "worse" to serve the mission of the project than a predominantly inclusionist one?
I think a fundamental inhibition against change is that people don't know how to achieve it: the lack of clarity in decision making processes is almost a usability issue. This is especially true for contentious large scale decisions. I wonder if WMF should officially "bless" certain decision-making processes, or if that would prevent innovation and experimentation.
Another method to achieve greater openness to change would be to specifically empower a group of people to conduct time-limited trials (technical trials, policy trials, etc.), on the basis of broader community suggestions. These would then be evaluated, with the final decision returned to the community as a whole. This would address the problem that any change that's highly debatable can never be tried out due to lack of consensus.