On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 7:20 PM, Abhinav Srivastava
<abhinav.srivastava(a)wikimedia.in> wrote:
Please be assured, although your concerns are genuine
but they do not hold
any weight. The only people who are somewhat intimately associated with the
Chapter are its founder members.
Continuing on my genuine weightless concerns, here's a set of excerpts
from the PDF in the original email containing this idea.
"The primary objective of setting up an advisory board at Wikimedia
India is to receive support, suggestions, guidance, advice and help in
achieving chapter’s objective from distinguished individuals having
excelled in their respective fields and mission. The advisory board
members would provide a non-binding advice to the Executive Committee
Members, Wikimedia India Staff and the community comprising of long
list of editors across different language groups."
"Advisory board members would provide the chapter with new knowledge,
development of strategic thinking and possible alternatives based on
their expertise from different fields. The advisory board would in
turn strengthen the executive committee and wikimedia staff to better
execute their work, but does not interfere with either the executive
committee or wikimedia india staff regarding the disclosure of
confidential documents or forceful execution of their advices."
"The selection of the advisory board members would be determined by
the nature of what is sought and expected by the chapter, as the per
the situation in that period"
And now there is detail about the composition of the board.
"The advisory board would not have any fixed size , but it is prefered
that it consist of 4-8 members.One member would be an individual
having an international experience in working with the Wikimedia
organisation. The next group of these members would be individuals who
were the founding members of the Chapter. The last group of members
would be individuals having experience across four different fields
such as legal, information technology, government regulation,
administrative experience, etc."
If the proposed advisory board is expected to bring in new knowledge,
development of strategic thinking etc then loading it up with
individuals who were the founding members of the chapter seems
orthogonal to the rationale. Also, there ought to be a cogent
explanation of "founding member of the chapter" is a selection
criteria in lieu of 'expertise from different fields'. Given that the
advisory board seems to be accountable to none, enforcing an arbitrary
group of people whose common denominator is being the founding member
of a chapter (which, to be fair, has been somewhat moribund) isn't
immediately encouraging.