Achal,
Good points. Thank you.
To have additional mods, it is fairly a simple process to add
them in mailman. I would suggest that atleast as a start, we can
ask people here to nominate themselves for the positions and we
can pick two. Would be great if they are already familiar with
the work. Please note that it is not a title, but a
daily work that comes your way.
About the chapter issues, I dont think we need to say more
that what Tinu and many others have already mentioned about.
While not counting out the efforts that were made by the
existing EC on building this out, Transparency is the primary
issue that echoes thru. It is probably worth remembering that
chapter is just a support system and has no control over the
projects or its actions. It is neither an administrative power
nor a place for people who just want to have a title on their
business card or get their expenses covered. Chapter will be
answerable to every single paisa spent to the community and
community should stand up and demand for the clarity and
visibility on things. If the chapter cannot do it, trust me, it
will not last for ever. Probably the interim EC should not have
re-elected themselves behind closed doors. Instead, they should
have probably opened the memberships and conducted the election
for the first official EC.
However, my vision about the future of EC is slightly
different from what we have now. Unlike many other chapters
around the world, Indic chapter have a unique challenge: Many
different language Wikimedia projects, ranging from highly
active to dead, (and more on the way) rolls up under its
umbrella. To deal with this, we can probably take a page out of
our democracy itself and consider building a representative
assembly style administration system for our future.
Some thoughts around this:
- Local Representation:All local wikis should elect a
respected member of their community for a period of a year
(or two) and form an administrative council for the chapter.
This could be per language basis or per project basis, based
on their community size. I would not exclude English, but
would limit the participation to one member in council. for
the rest of projects - It could be probably like for every
project that has more than 50 (this is just a number, we can
look at the real world situations) active people (not
including bots) - we can allocate one member per project to
the council. other wise, one member per language projects
would be enuf. this is just to ensure that we have enuf
coverage per project and per language depending on the size
of people.
- Formation of EC: From the administrative council,
the EC can be elected in for a term. This election should be
by the chapter members / local language wikimedians.
- Limit on Term in EC: It may also be worth enforcing
that no project gets more than one (or at the most 2)
consecutive term in EC (if we have enuf representations to
fill in all slots). This will ensure that all projects gets
it share of EC terms over the years.
- Communication: A Monthly or quarterly report of
the chapter activities should be published by the EC and
admin council. Individual representatives are and should be
responsible for communication between chapter and projects.
Should there be a reason to replace the member by the local
community, such a provision should be provided.
- Removal of member: Inactivity and lose of trust by
the general public should be considered as a reason for
removal as usual. On the other hand, if the rest of the
administrative council members feels against one member,
chapter should be able to request for replacement citing
proper reasons for it.
- Funds and Grants: All funds and grants from
chapter account probably can be openly discussed and
approved on the foundation wiki or meta wiki (like the
foundation grant process)
- Audit and Annual report: End of every financial
year, an audit committee for the financial and functional
aspects of the chapter's actions should be formed from the
administrative council and audit results should be made
public along with the annual reports.
We can go on like this, but I would leave it open to further
discussions.
Thanks.