The nature of online communities is such that you simply won't have access to the information that would be required to make an informed judgement about an applicant. You can't require details of their Wikimedia activities since they could simply deny being a Wikimedian (and I believe we are agreed that we don't want to restrict membership to Wikimedians only). If you know of a reason why you should reject an application you would be reckless to ignore it, but there can be no reasonable expectation on you to do any research into applicants, since such research is impossible.

The risk of lots of people joining to manipulate board elections is very real - if we had the default staggered board resignations it would be much reduced, since there would never be a majority of the board being elected at one time (barring early resignations/deaths/etc.). Unfortunately, I didn't think of that when I was trying to persuade you against having everyone resign at once, perhaps if I had, I would have been successful... Anyway, what's done is done, the best way to mitigate the risk now is to recruit as many good members as possible - the more good members we have the more bad members will need to sneak in in order to gain a majority. Recruitment will need to be one of the top priorities for the board after the AGM (it should be a priority for the current board too, but not a top one - handling setup is top).

My viewpoint here is that we should always assume good faith, but keep an eye out for activity which might be suspicious, which could then be raised for discussion at a board meeting, or if necessary at a general meeting.

We shouldn't refuse membership applications because we think that the applicants might be timewasters, or might have a history of abuse; those are more issues that would lead to the termination of membership. That said, if we get repeat applications from people whose membership has been previously terminated, then that would be grounds for refusing the application. If lots of people from the same small location apply, then we should only be worried if they would make up a large fraction of the membership, which I doubt would happen (either there's no motivation whilst we're small, or we'll be large enough later that the funds to join the organization in sufficient mass would be too great).

Mike

On 29 Nov 2008, at 00:06, Andrew Turvey wrote:

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?

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