A "member-led" organisation - imagine that? In simple terms, an
organisation that trusts the 5,000-strong UK Wikimedia community more than
a handful of people who currently sit on the board.
My goodness how far away has the chapter gone from those original values.
Hi Andrew,
Just wanted to respond to your email. I could reply at great length
(indeed, I started drafting several replies, some of which tried to deal
with everything about Wikimedia UK's values) but as I am running out of
time to finish this email I want to focus on just one specific issue - the
main one covered in this EGM - which is about the co-option of Trustees.
The ultimate goal, to which this proposal is an end, is broadening the
skills and experience available on the Board. In the light of the
experience of the last year, I personally think that's an important goal
and it is important that we do that. Indeed, if we'd had a couple more
voices on the Board in the last year with more prior experience of charity
governance then I think we might well have approached some issues
differently and saved ourselves, the membership, and the community a lot of
trouble.
It's quite possible to argue that it ought to be possible to elect people
with an appropriately broad range of skills and experience from on and off
Wikipedia, and that is a viewpoint I respect. Our members are very
intelligent people and certainly have our mission, values and ethos at
heart. My own view, however, is that it would be very helpful to be able to
co-opt to fill not just casual vacancies but gaps in experience. Not just
in terms of making life easier for the Board - or the Chair or the Chief
Executive - but in improving the performance of the Board, and thus helping
the whole organisation.
It's also worth pointing out that this recommendation from the Governance
Review is adopted by the membership (and, of course, it's the members'
decision) the whole Board will remain accountable to the membership -
including of course the provisions of s168 of the Companies' Act which mean
the membership can if they so wish remove directors. So if the membership
really did want to "sack the lot of them" it remains possible. Speaking
personally, I'd like to think I would step down voluntarily long before
there was any feeling of "you have sat here too long for any good you have
been doing".
Regards,
Chris
First step down the slippery slope was the move towards two-year terms.
Now we have these bonkers changes drempt up by a consultancy who took no
consideration whatsoever of our particular values and want to
model ourselves on other board-led charities. Guess what, we know how other
charities are run and make a conscious decision at the start to do
something different. After all, no other encyclopedias are written by
non-specialists. Wikipedia was the first major website to give its entire
content away under a free license. No other major website is run by a
charity. Of course we're different. That's the bloody point.
For goodness sake, they even want to change the articles to get some
complex provision in there that means there would never be a majority of
directors up for election in a single year - because god forbid that the
community would actually wanting to kick out a poorly-performing board en
mass. God forbid the board should be subject to any accountability for
their performance.
All I can say is thank goodness we don't have a board that is poorly
performing, divided, poorly led, losing control of the direction of the
charity, losing their major source of income or anything like that.
Because who knows what would happen then?
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
Obviously it will be for the membership to decide whether to accept or
reject these particular recommendations but it would be great if you could
review the draft amendments at this stage.
Please do read, consider and comment, here:
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/EGM_2013/Draft_Resolutions
PS. Just to clarify, these are resolutions as drafted by our lawyers:
they have not yet been reviewed by the Board - obviously it remains
important that we draft things in public where we can!
Chris
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia UK mailing list
wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
WMUK:
http://uk.wikimedia.org
--
Andrew Turvey
--
07403 216 991
@AndrewTurvey <https://twitter.com/#!/AndrewTurvey>
http://www.facebook.com/andrew.turvey
http://en.wikipedia.org/User:AndrewRT
http://englishwikipedian.blogspot.co.uk/
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia UK mailing list
wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
WMUK:
http://uk.wikimedia.org