Bence é o boss do AffCom, pensando nisso leiam: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Bence Damokos &lt;bdamokos(a)gmail.com&gt; Date: 19 February 2013 10:42 Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Are chapters part of the community and board seats for affiliates? To: Wikimedia Mailing List &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; 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 &lt;jdevreede(a)wikimedia.org also "community year… > > thoughts anyone? > > Jan-Bart > > > On Feb 19, 2013, at 8:42 AM, James Alexander &lt;jamesofur(a)gmail.com> > > Snipping a bunch for simplicities sake > > > > On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 11:14 PM, Jan-Bart de Vreede < > > jdevreede(a)wikimedia.org> >> > >> 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 as readers of _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton rodrigo.argenton(a)gmail.com +55 11 97 97 18 884