Hey,

interesting take - will think on this.

If we accept that there might be a duality, the points made in the video could help. Perhaps it might be intersting to look into this as a possible solution (see Council of Stellar Management - CCP/EVE Online) and get over the bi-polar phase (simplification: anarchistic with attributes of a collective on the one side to use your characterisation and legal entities on the other) to a truly multi-polar community with equal partners...

And it's important to get the community integrated in a more formal way into decision making processes... something like the Chapter Dialogue by Nicole, the voting idea for the wikimedia engineering team by gryllida or the "steering group" for software dev proposed by Anders might be a great tool for regular feedback and participation (?!) - interesting times.

That said, we are again at the "duality" that Gerard said does not exist. His last post detailing his thoughts on the community are rightly characterising the volunteer part of the community as an ever-changing ad-hoc group while not taking into account the form of the WMF and the organisational legal forms of local chapters as hierarchically structured legal entities with charters clearly stating a pre-defined goal (etc). This weakens the characterisation of the wikipedia family in it's entity as a collective (changes of objectives common in collectives are either not possible or too wide to be achievable).

Further, the legal documents of the local legal entities also have to state a clear purpose, voting proceedings and more, which might be used to find out what people want and what they would agree to, if community voting by users does not have enough representational force in his or Magnus' opinion (Magnus' argument being that the numbers are too low to truly represent the community).

These points should be adressed or at least defined e.g. what a possible representative majority of the users should be (magnus uses edits for example).

Cheers,

gh

Thursday, August 28, 2014, 9:28:02 PM, you wrote:

Hi all,

I just saw this nice video on Why ordinary people need to understand power http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_liu_why_ordinary_people_need_to_understand_power#_=_, by Eric Liu, from Citizen University http://www.citizenuniversity.us/.

Although my personal interest goes beyond the wiki-world scope, I'd like to recommend this video for it covers some important subjects that might be related to some tensions we see so often in the Wikimedia movement (WMF vs. volunteers, Chapters vs. WMF, online vs offline volunteers, lack of leadership at some crucial moments and places, tirany of the structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness etc.).

Thoughts welcome.

Tom