The job of the "Community Advocacy" bit of "Legal and Community Advocacy" is, as I understand it, to advocate for the community's need within the Foundation, and act as a conduit to the community for legal stuff.
That department and its predecessors have hired professional attorneys to lobby on copyright and patent issues for several years on multiple continents. Recently they have been active in many other legal advocacy areas including international trade, for example. The process by which those issues was selected has in the past had more to do than what the Board of Trustees could agree on, resulting in a common denominator fare less inclusive than typical volunteer opinions on what is an is not important to them, their families, their local communities, and the factors which determine the time and effort they are able to contribute. Willful ignorance of such factors is not good volunteer recruiting practice.
Their job is not to advocate for "reduction in public school class sizes"....
Is there any reason to think that reduction of public school class sizes is not likely to result in more productive editors, with more time to contribute, or that it would not attract quality volunteers relative to taking no position on the question?
On 14 March 2014 00:54, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
The job of the "Community Advocacy" bit of "Legal and Community Advocacy" is, as I understand it, to advocate for the community's need within the Foundation, and act as a conduit to the community for legal stuff.
That department and its predecessors have hired professional attorneys to lobby on copyright and patent issues for several years on multiple continents. Recently they have been active in many other legal advocacy areas including international trade, for example. The process by which those issues was selected has in the past had more to do than what the Board of Trustees could agree on, resulting in a common denominator fare less inclusive than typical volunteer opinions on what is an is not important to them, their families, their local communities, and the factors which determine the time and effort they are able to contribute. Willful ignorance of such factors is not good volunteer recruiting practice.
Can you give an example of international trade lobbying?
The department lobbying on copyright and patent issues doesn't shock me. It's the /legal/ department. Copyright is kind of important to us ;).
Their job is not to advocate for "reduction in public school class sizes"....
Is there any reason to think that reduction of public school class sizes is not likely to result in more productive editors, with more time to contribute, or that it would not attract quality volunteers relative to taking no position on the question?
Not in the slightest, but that's not the test for whether we should plow movement/foundation money and time into it. Pretty much *everything* that is a Good Idea could, by your standards, fall into 'things we should consider lobbying on'. To take this to its logical extreme; let's campaign on the issues necessary for a zero cost economy! If everything is incredibly cheap and/or free, everyone can be an artist or a philosopher or an editor instead of having to do pesky things like 'working', and that way we'll have all the editors we could possibly need.
That doesn't mean it's a thing we should spend time on, though. When I look at the list of things I see a lot of stuff, such as reduction in public school class sizes, that would help the community indirectly. I don't see a lot of things that are likely enough to (a) succeed and (b) provide a meaningful impact that we should spend limited movement resources and time on them. Even assuming that people did say "yes, we want the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs a website, to campaign on child working hours and rights!", you note yourself that the lawyers would likely consider this absolutely anathema to our legal restrictions around lobbying - so even were this unlikely outcome to occur, it wouldn't go anywhere. Since it won't go anywhere, and it's unlikely to occur in the first place, it's a waste of volunteer time to find out how much they think we should do something we absolutely cannot do.
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