Hoi, There is a long list of people who say that Wikipedia is doomed, that it will not survive another year. Some people leave in disgust, some people start their own project. For the record I have started another project and sadly it is not part of the Wikimedia Foundation and I do think that Wiktionary will exist in a years time. I also think that Wikipedia will do great in the coming year.
Given that Wikipedia grows rapidly, we need people who have a positive view on what can be done. This means that people who are blatantly negative about the organisation should not stand for election. When like Danny you leave the employment in a huff and insists on running with the slogan: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" it does not demonstrate a positive towards our organisation. Given the rather public outing of what are in his mind dirty linen, the negative attitude is underlined even more.
With an embargo to stand for a year, the immediacy of these kind of threads are made less acute and potent.
The fact that many voted for Danny make no difference to the argument, the only thing that is clear is that not enough people voted for him.
I have seen objections raised to ex-board members become employees of the Foundation. This is something I do not understand. In order to want to become an employee, the Foundation has a vacancy and has to offer a job. Given the high profile nature of such a job, it will not be a decision made only by the executive director but also by the board itself. In order to WANT to be employed in this way, a person has to have a positive attitude towards the Foundation and its projects. Such a person has an intimate knowledge of the organisation and is likely to be able to keep his nose clean. It also makes a difference what type of job is offered, when there is a position of "musical director", Oscar would be eminently capable of taking this job and it would be silly not to consider him if he were available.
I also fail to see why there is a conflict of interest. When a board member exits gracefully from the board or chapter, it may be exactly in the interest of the Foundation, a Chapter to offer a job. It is not as if there is a promise that such a job will be available.
Thanks, GerardM
On 7/16/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 16/07/07, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, You misrepresent what is proposed. What is proposed is that employees
and
ex-employees for a period of one year are not eligible to stand for the position of board member.
As a consequence your whole argument does not address the issue.
My apologies - the one year (or six months, or whatever) is still a little shaky to my mind in terms of its justification, but has the excellent merit of being a nice clear "cooling off" period. It has much less of the air of presupposing malice, and does prevent hastiness. It's a bit odd, but it's measured and sensible.
It also allows us to apply it fairly to contractors and interns and so on - as it is, unilaterally banning someone who worked as an intern for a few months seems excessive, and you can get into all sorts of quibbles about whether or not a contractor was employed, etc. And perhaps, for transparency's sake, we could apply it to any potential employee of a chapter?
"If you have received money for services rendered to the Foundation or a recognised local chapter, not counting reimbursements for out-of-pocket expenditure, then you cannot run for a position on the WMF Board of Trustees for [one year] from the date of the most recent payment" - or something like that.
(And we should *certainly* have a converse policy - once on the board, you can't receive employment from the Foundation or a chapter within a set period! That's by far the bigger conflict of interest...)
*However*, I note that under your proposed rule Danny would still have been unable to run, and as such my argument is still pretty much exactly the same - 29.2% of the electorate voted for someone you would want us to have ruled out of the running, almost enough to win him a seat, and we need to consider the implications of that little detail.
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- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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