Mostly reasonable enough. My point on positions was that since this board was only going to be around for three months it might be more efficient to assign tasks on a task by task basis rather than a role by role one, particularly as assignments of tasks should require much less discussion than assignment of roles. This certainly does not mean that we'd be in an "everyone thought someone else would do it" situation, as those task assignments would be a matter of public record. A task based approach also keeps at least some collective responsibility for things getting done for the whole board, which to me seems right, since if we fail, we fail as an ensemble. It also means that when the job of one "role" can be parallelized, it will be.
You write: "There are other times that retreating in camera will probably be required, e.g. discussion of new members where personal info needs to be shared/discussed." This raises an interesting question we were briefly discussing on IRC last night: namely is there any situation where we would reject the membership application of someone who met the legal requirements? I can imagine we may decide to eventually reject those who had not paid supporting membership fees, but I really cannot see any reason for blocking an application beyond this. I certainly think it would be wrong to tie membership to on wiki activity or seniority in the community. Does anyone have strong opinions the other way?
As for opening up voting results, I should probably note that the email you were replying to was by Thomas Dalton (Tango) not me... The main reason I think to want to do it is just that "it's the done thing" which rather suggests that people smarter than us have decided it's optimal. Openness is good in itself, it provides some minimal verification of the results, and it's also important for future elections: it means candidates can see what was popular previously, it means they can decide if there's any point them making the effort to stand in future and it means voters can potentially adjust their voting strategy for tactical reasons in future (just imagine how hard it would be for e.g. people with both labour and liberal sympathies to decide how to vote in tory constituencies if they did not know the historical tallies). It may also provide the fairest way of deciding upon a chair...
Tom
-----Original Message----- From: wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Peel Sent: 02 October 2008 08:58 To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] WMUK Agenda
Tom et al.,
Sending to the list as this discussion shouldn't be private. Unless we start getting significant numbers of "too much traffic" complaints, we should be discussing everything publically. (Sorry guys, I don't mean to be an arse.)
Fine with me.
Reply to the below, apologies if this sounds a little adversarial, I'm just trying to keep us focussed on what's important:
OK; I'll use the same approach then. :)
#1 That was not a formal election and we are not at this point a formal board. Lets leave the bureaucracy behind until it's legally necessary.
It's something that will only take a few minutes, and it would be good to have it recorded in the meeting notes.
#2 Assigning positions beyond those mandated by law (that is to say, secretary) at this point is a bit of a waste of time. We're a small board and it will generally be more efficient to assign jobs on a case by case basis until after the AGM at which point many of us may no longer be on the board and WMUK can start doing what it was set up to do. Lets not play the "handing out basically meaningless roles" game.
The rationale behind having 5 positions for 5 people is that it evens out the workload, so that everyone has a main-stay useful thing that they are doing. It doesn't preclude people from doing other things. As a minimum, we need the three positions: chair, secretary, treasurer. They may not be legally mandated, but meetings won't go smoothly if we don't have a chair (as an example; the chair of course will do more than that), we need someone who is in charge of the actual paperwork, and we need someone who is in charge of opening the bank account, and keeping track of any expenses that may occur as we go along.
Membership was something that was notably weak in WMUK1, so it would be good to have someone in charge of that. Communications (mainly external) would also be useful, although the chair could conceivably do that.
#3 Weekly meetings are fine, but they must not become an excuse for delaying decision making until the next meeting. This list and general IRC should be fine for most of the required discussions. The only circumstance when we should be forced to retreat to meetings for decisions is when someone on the board objects to the consensus decision and a board vote is necessary.
Weekly meetings would be good for keeping things going. I concur that they must not be an excuse for delaying decisions, but on the flip side we shouldn't rush things - so if things need to be delayed by a week, so be it. There are other times that retreating in camera will probably be required, e.g. discussion of new members where personal info needs to be shared/discussed.
#4 This can wait a while. Once everything is squared with chapters committee we'll get an internal wiki and at that point someone can ask JamesF nicely to transfer the domain. (This has been much discussed already.)
True, it can wait, but it would be good to make a start on it sooner rather than later (although the same applies for everything else too...)
#5 The MoA and AoA are what we need to discuss. They've been talked about a fair bit on this list already, and I got the impression that we'd agreed that we want to basically replicate the changes made by Alison to the original template. If someone (Tango? Alison?) has a list of these changes we can discuss them one by one in the meeting. We also need to discuss the objectives. The objectives list here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Wikimedia_UK_v2.0/Objectives is currently those of WMUK 1.0 with a few that I shoved on the front last month. None of these have really been discussed. We certainly won't make a final decision at the meeting (not least because everything has to be run past my tame-barrister and any other legal advice we're getting), but there's no reason we can't have a good bash at a draft by the end of it.
Yup; I agree that this is the main thing to discuss. Hearing Tango's and Alison's comments (and anyone else's) on the standard MoA and AoA we have on the meta at the moment would be great. Whether the board meeting is the right place for an in-depth discussion of the MoA/AoA/ objectives is another question; wouldn't that best be done on this list first?
The only other thing to discuss is whether there are any strong objections to the voting tallies becoming public. Perhaps this will have to be our first board vote (though since the mini-"electoral commission" are completely independent of us they are not at all obliged to listen to anything we decide on the matter).
I think it would be good to have a (short?) discussion about this, probably including people in #wikimedia-uk. I don't particularly care either way, but at the same time I'm not entirely convinced by the reasons you gave for wanting the tallies made public - perhaps you can convince me?
From your email: 1. isn't a good reason, 2. if someone did resign, what difference would knowing the tallies actually make? Bear in mind that only the 5 of us made the 50% mark. 3. I would hope that people would recognize that their votes at AGMs matter anyway, regardless of the tallies from this election. 4. Is there anything we could learn from the counts that we wouldn't figure out anyway?
Tom
Mike