Congrats to Erik, and here are my own thoughts of how his particular strengths could best be applied. I got this stuff by going through his candidate statement and pulling out the things that I personally think are both the most important and exciting and which match his interests and skills.
Erik, I hope you find this helpful.
1. Openness - I think the entire board is strongly in support of openness and transparency, and in particular with respect to committee processes. The difficulty has been in how to properly balance openness with the need for privacy and discretion in certain matters. Your first platform plank was to work on "a clear and sensible proposal as to how we can guarantee transparency, openness, participation and accountability within these Wikimedia committees." Bravo!
2. "To avoid both extremes, we need to build a diverse Board whose members are trained to resolve conflicts" - bravo again. I hope that you will support me in efforts to quickly expand the board to include not only more people from the community, but also people who can help us in other ways with professional expertise and/or public credibility. Obviously, this is to be a hot topic for the October board retreat, and quite possibly sooner.
3. Developing world projects - I strongly support that we, as a community and organization, turn our attention increasingly to a more global perspective. We know that the elections for the board (just to cite one example) were heavily skewed towards the European languages, and specifically Western and Northern European languages.
It is easy to make a prediction: within 10 years, Arabic Wikipedia (just to pick one example) will be larger than German Wikipedia (for instance) today. This means that world projects should be a top priority, and I think one of your best skills has always been to guide large scale proposals (wikinews for example) to broad community acceptance. I hope that you will focus a lot on that.
On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
- Openness - I think the entire board is strongly in support of
openness and transparency, and in particular with respect to committee processes. The difficulty has been in how to properly balance openness with the need for privacy and discretion in certain matters. Your first platform plank was to work on "a clear and sensible proposal as to how we can guarantee transparency, openness, participation and accountability within these Wikimedia committees." Bravo!
Err you might want to watch certain episodes of yes minister before using phrasing like that. You risk worrying a section of the brits.
- "To avoid both extremes, we need to build a diverse Board whose
members are trained to resolve conflicts" - bravo again. I hope that you will support me in efforts to quickly expand the board to include not only more people from the community, but also people who can help us in other ways with professional expertise and/or public credibility. Obviously, this is to be a hot topic for the October board retreat, and quite possibly sooner.
Any chance of some librarians?
- Developing world projects - I strongly support that we, as a
community and organization, turn our attention increasingly to a more global perspective. We know that the elections for the board (just to cite one example) were heavily skewed towards the European languages, and specifically Western and Northern European languages.
Stand by for some more if EU enlargement has the effect it normaly does.
It is easy to make a prediction: within 10 years, Arabic Wikipedia (just to pick one example) will be larger than German Wikipedia (for instance) today.
Well it would be if most major arabic speaking countries were not blocking us by 2008. Still I'm sure we will handle that.
Jimmy to Erik Moller
I hope that you will support me in efforts to quickly expand the board to include not only more people from the community, but also people who can help us in other ways with professional expertise and/or public credibility. Obviously, this is to be a hot topic for the October board retreat, and quite possibly sooner.
Jimmy shouldn't that be a question to the community at large instead of to Erik Moller in particular? The community has a pretty good track record in choosing able and committed board members, 3 out of 3 so far, an unmatched achievement. Not just producing noise, or in your words, too often "blaming or yelling when something goes wrong".
So I hope your congrats extend to the community as well.
You talk about possibly expanding the board even before the October retreat, or am I misreading your statement, or hint?
I would hope the October retreat is at least partially in order to add depth to these discussions in extensive dialog with the community and making sensible proposals for the community to decide on. Trusting the community to have the final say in matters of this importance is crucial to the long term credibility of the project.
I'm not saying all new board members should be community members. I'm saying: let the comunity vote on the size of the board, and its constituents. Your charisma will ensure that external candidates that you propose will receive ample attention. External candidates who are eager to participate in our mission (willing is not enough) will welcome public debate, even about their achievements and supposedly added value.
Erik Zachte
Erik Zachte wrote:
Jimmy shouldn't that be a question to the community at large instead of to Erik Moller in particular?
Both. :)
The community has a pretty good track record in choosing able and committed board members, 3 out of 3 so far, an unmatched achievement. Not just producing noise, or in your words, too often "blaming or yelling when something goes wrong".
I agree with you completely. I should clarify -- it is a tiny percentage of people, and even then, only a tiny percentage of the time, when that sort of thing happens. What I was talking about at that time is precisely that I think the community is absolutely critical to the foundation.
So I hope your congrats extend to the community as well.
You talk about possibly expanding the board even before the October retreat, or am I misreading your statement, or hint?
It is not up to me to decide, but of course it is possible.
--Jimbo
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