The Board has decided to put on its agenda for the next meeting the process for admitting
new members.
One question I wanted to raise for discussion among the community is what kind of
"due diligence" should the Board do when admitting members.
Most of the people who get involved in the wikimedia projects do so because they want to
contribute in a positive way to the projects. Unfortunately, given the open door attitude
we have of "anyone can edit", we also attract people to the projects who spend
most of their efforts vandalising, defacing, pov-pushing or playing the system.
This can also carry over into the running of chapters. Sadly, we have already seen this
with Wikimedia UK v2 - where one person - a persistent sock-puppet on the projects - put
themselves forward as a candidate using two identitities, lied about their age and later
lied about their professional qualifications.
When we were drafting the constitution, we adopted the standard Articles for charities,
which give the Board fairly broad powers to refuse (or remove) membership if they consider
this in the best interests of the charity. This is subject to a due process that the Board
must follow and a right of appeal to the AGM, which the Board decided to beef up from the
standard rules.
The draft membership rules at the moment mention these as examples of where the Board may
refuse membership:
- missing information or signature from the application form
- fee not paid
- information on the form "obviously fabricated"
- behaviour on Wikimedia UK community areas (the meta pages, email list and IRC)
Examples of invalid considerations include:
- activity/inactivity on Wikimedia projects
- behaviour on Wikimedia projects
I don't want to exaggerate the potential problems, but there are certain risks which I
think we ought to take reasonable steps to minimise. These risks include:
- time wasting - people trying to play us so we spend all our time dealing with their
obstructions rather than doing things to further our objects
- entryism - people getting all their friends to sign up so they can get voted onto the
Board (more of a problem when we have more income/assets)
Coming back to my question - what kind of due diligence should the Board do? You could say
just do nothing - trust that there will be enough reasonable people to outweigh the
isolated troublemaker and their impact can be contained. With this approach we could be
accused of complacency if we do run into problems.
At the other extreme we could vet every applicant and ask them to provide references,
nominators and their activity logs from a wikimedia project. This strikes me as being too
restrictive for the kind of organisation we want to be.
My feeling is that we just need to keep a watchful eye open to signs of abuse. This is
particularly the responsibility of the Membership Secretary who needs to bring anything of
concern to the attention of the Board. Things to look out for include getting lots of
applications from one small town, all drawn on the same cheque and also where certain
individuals apply for membership who have a history of abuse. I think this is probably the
most effective way to deal with this kind of thing in parctice.
What do others think?