While my first impression of this proposed plan is fairly positive, I do have one major concern.
Wiadomość napisana przez Ramzy Muliawan ramzymuliawan14@gmail.com w dniu 24.02.2016, o godz. 11:47:
- Six regional seats, popularly elected by the regional communities. The
proposed "regional communities" would be North America, South and Central America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and Asia Pacific and Oceania.
- Five at-large seats, or what we call today as community seats. Like the
regional one, it will be popularly elected --- but by the whole community.
My concern with the "at-large" seats is that if we’ve looked at the history of community Board elections, the electorate is overwhelmingly from the developed world. The candidates are also overwhelmingly from the developed world. We’ve already seen this in the current election, where despite the presence of six fine developing world candidates, myself included, the electorate settled on three white men (no offense to Dariusz, Denny and James).
Under this proposed plan, Europe and North America will get one seat each. Let’s hypothesize that all the elected "at-large" seats went to developed world candidates. And then the affiliate seats have also traditionally gone to developed countries as well. Then we have Jimmy’s seat. Under this plan, we run the risk of having eleven of the fifteen seats dominated by developed countries. So does this mean that the remaining four seats should simply be tokens for developing countries, but to which we have no leverage because we can easily be outvoted by the other members of the Board?
Last year, I had spoken out against quotas for developing countries, since it effectively puts our representation at the mercy of the Board. I am still figuring out what would be the best way to approach this issue, especially since voting for community Board seats is by language, not by country, but I’m looking at a mixture of temporary quotas (and I stress "temporary"), developing stronger mechanisms for getting developing country Wikipedians involved in movement governance (through affiliates, stronger consultation mechanisms when discussing movement-wide issues, etc.), and weighted voting in favor of certain geographies if this is technologically possible.
Josh
JAMES JOSHUA G. LIM Bachelor of Arts in Political Science Class of 2013, Ateneo de Manila University Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines
jamesjoshualim@yahoo.com mailto:jamesjoshualim@yahoo.com | +63 (977) 831-7582 Facebook/Twitter: akiestar | Wikimedia: Sky Harbor http://about.me/josh.lim http://about.me/josh.lim