- The people in the WMF and the Affiliates are /part of/ of the
communities.
- Even the people without extensive years of volunteering, or those who
only started volunteering at the same time as they became professionally involved, are part of the communities.
- It is illogical for us to tell the people who take on highly-active
roles, that they are no longer able to lead.
- We (collectively) try to encourage the extremely capable volunteers to
apply for jobs, and for grants.
- If Wikimedia Cascadia becomes a well-funded chapter, and you were a
staffer of it, would you become ineligible to lead proposals that effect your area of activity?
The way that I tend to think about this question -- which as I'll explain in a minute, I know is simplified -- is that by "the community" we mean people who are not WMF employees or employees of affiliates, and who contribute to the Wikiverse in some way.
This email is going to sound legalistic at first but I hope you'll read it all the way through.
The reason behind that thinking (and others may have their own thoughts on this) is that WMF and affiliate employees are receiving financial and non-financial compensation from WMF or their affiliate, and they have strong incentives -- in some cases, legal obligations -- to do what their employer tells them to do and to comply with their contracts, or else lose their job and possibly get a bad reference which could impact the likelihood of them being hired by anyone else. Also, I doubt that many WMF and affiliate employees would feel that it's permissible and safe for them to publicly critique the members of their governing boards, which is another difference between employees and community members.
There are also cultural differences. WMF is organized hierarchically, is opaque about details of its financial spending (an illustration of this was the contract with Sue for consulting work which was a surprise when I learned about it), has chosen to use technical means to override community RfC decisions (such as with Superprotect), and isn't a membership organization.
WMF does a lot of valuable work in support of the community, for example by running servers, handling subpoenas, developing software, and providing grants to individuals and organizations. Affiliate employees also do very important work, such as with Wikidata and the Wikipedia in Education program.
Admittedly, the dichotomy of "community membership" / "employee" is a simplification. For example, individual grantees and contractors may do temporary or part-time work for WMF or an affiliate. Affiliates as organizations have some interest in the health and policies of WMF and staying on somewhat good terms with WMF, particularly regarding WMF's role as a grantmaker and provider of trademark licenses.
I think that having WMF and affiliate employees in support roles is important and valuable. However, one place where problems start to surface is when WMF or affiliate employees start to tell their communities what to do. That is not their job. Their job is to support the community and to implement policy, not to manage the community, and not to create policy without approval from either their organization's board or from the community that they serve.
The "community" vs "employee" dichotomy makes it sound like there are no shades of gray, but there are, and I'd welcome conversations about how to develop a vocabulary that better illustrates this.
To answer your last question directly: yes, there are initiatives which I would feel would be inappropriate for me to lead as an affiliate or WMF employee, for example I would feel OK about *facilitating* community discussion about a global ban policy but I wouldn't want to create and impose that policy myself without some kind of community consensus. Also, I would be much more cautious about what I chose to say about the governance of WMF and my affiliate employer, because I would have financial and employment interests that would conflict with my ability to speak candidly, especially in public.
A brief follow-up to Adrian regarding :
A lack of other community members participation is perhaps half on a lack of advertising, and half on a lack of interest.
From what I can see, Matthew has been thorough about trying to recruit
participation.
I'm trying to leave the door open to approving some kind of TCoC. Perhaps there will indeed be community consensus to approve the draft that's currently in the works -- I don't know. I prefer a different process and some changes to the draft, but with the information that I have it's impossible for me to predict what the outcome of an RfC on the final document will be. If it's approved with significant community (i.e. non-WMF support), I'll learn to accept it or propose amendments at some point. I realize that there has been good-faith effort in developing that draft, and I appreciate the effort even if the draft doesn't pass. From my perspective, a bigger problem with conduct policy at the moment is the situation with WMF's global ban practices, as has been discussed elsewhere.
Pine