---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:
Bence Damokos <bdamokos@gmail.com>
Date: 19 February 2013 10:42
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Are chapters part of the community and board seats for affiliates?
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi,
I'll separate this out as I think it is a really interesting conversation,
and as I have heard the two arguments below repeated numerous times, it
might be useful to think about it and the future shape of things a bit more.
I think the fundamental question is how legitimate can an interest group
(chapters in this case) be if it's membership is significantly smaller than
its potential membership (at least 30% of editors come from countries with
well established chapters in afaik good standing with their local
community)?
The difference in the answer to this question could be behind the two
"memes" on chapters being seen as insignificant or significant parts of the
community based either on their membership or potential membership size.
I like to believe that people who go beyond online editing (or in the case
of readers and donors, beyond online donations and reading) into the
offline world are among the most dedicated of our volunteers, and knowing
their background, they usually are well embedded in their
local/national/linguistic communities, to the point that they are able to
recognize and represent their interests.
(Especially, as chapters tend to have open structures, often giving the
right to be heard to any non-member and generally not making it difficult
to become a member even for those advocating different directions.)
However, as our communities are very diverse (someone active on Wikipedia
and the chapter might not be aware of recent developments in Wiktionary and
vice versa), we need to constantly think about ways of informing and better
engaging those whose interests we wish to represent (be this at the WMF or
the individual chapter level).
Even if we don't subscribe to the wider interpretation of representation of
the potential members, the actual members are still showing a level of
dedication that I think makes it worthwhile hearing their voice in e.g.
board selections.
All that said, the chapter selected board seat is related to the
communities the chapters are embedded in at a further step of remove
because of the way the process is conducted. (The list of candidates and
questions to them, etc. are in theory non-public – although the candidate
may choose to make it public on Meta – so the boards of chapters might not
be in a position to directly survey their members' preferences and have to
bring the decision on their own.)
Therefore, I think there are definite possibilities to improve on the
selection process, even with just chapters.
Best regards,
Bence
On Tue, Feb 19,
2013 at 9:26 AM, Jan-Bart de Vreede <
jdevreede@wikimedia.org
> wrote:
> Hey
>
> I think that chapters represent a different part of the movement, and that
> their input in board composition results in different candidates than we
> would possibly elect :) At the same time the increased scope of affcom also
> gives us the option of increasing the scope of these two selected seats to
> include thematic organisations and user groups (giving them more "community
> coverage" than is the case now). That would be a good discussion to have
> over de coming months as the selected seats term expires in july next year…
>
> thoughts anyone?
>
> Jan-Bart
>
>
> On Feb 19,
2013, at 8:42 AM, James Alexander <
jamesofur@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Snipping a bunch for simplicities sake
> >
> > On Mon, Feb 18,
2013 at 11:14 PM, Jan-Bart de Vreede <
> >
jdevreede@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> I simply don't agree.
> >> a) Chapters are part of the community
> >> b) Whenever a vote comes up for an appointed seat that seat obviously
> does
> >> not vote, therefore the (s)elected seats have a majority vote on any
> >> appointed seat (5 our of 9 votes) Apart from that I would say that
> Jimmy's
> >> seat is a community seat, but recognise that not all share that
> viewpoint.
> >>
> >> Jan-Bart
> >>
> >
> > :-/ To be honest I don't particularly like this meme that the chapter are
> > part of the community either. The chapters may be part of the community
> > (and so the statement not false) but we use the phrasing in such a way as
> > to say that they are more then they are. There may be a part of the
> > community but they are really a very small part of it overall.
> >
> > Their power in board selection and movement voice (both formally and
> > informally) is disproportionately huge and we set them up to represent
> the
> > community when that is a serious misstatement. They represent their
> members
> > who are a very small subset of the community and often have a very
> > different goal and interest set then the, much larger, remainder of the
> > community and depending on the chapter may include more donors or readers
> > then editors.
> >
> > That is not to say they don't do good things at times (or that it is a
> > problem to include donors or readers, personally I think they are part of
> > our larger community) but we should not confuse what they actually are.
> >
> > Jimmy is a whole different question ;) I would certainly say he deserves
> a
> > seat at the table, I prefer to just categorize him as "Jimmy" because
> he's
> > just a class of his own in all ways :).
> >
> > James
> > _______________________________________________
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