Kunal,
I hear you but we only have 3 people who actually put the effort into applying for the position. We are appointing people who are at least trying to help. If you want to help in the process please feel free to put your name on the list.
"I currently count about 33 out of 40 TDF members being WMF Staff. Over
the past 90 days, only 49.4% of Gerrit patches came from WMF Staff[1].
My straw-dog proposal is that representation should be proportional,
i.e. WMF Staff should make up less than half of the TDF, or whatever
decision-making body replaces it."
If you can't even get more than 2 people to apply for the positions what ideas do you have to increase the number of experienced representatives? So based on what you said we should only have 3 people as representatives, 2 from the community and 1 from WMF.
"The negativity mostly exists because people (WMF staff and volunteers)
having spent months asking questions about TDF composition and decisions
and then were entirely ghosted."
"I am fine with saying the quiet part out loud. Most volunteer developers
aren't interested in participating in the TDF because it treats them as
second-class participants. Contrasting to TechCom, which for all its
faults at least had public meetings that volunteers could participate in
as equals, the implementation of the TDF literally left volunteers as an
afterthought."
I was not there but from what I understand TechCom did not achieve what it set out to do. If TechCom worked TDF would not exist.
"At this point joining the TDF would only add the appearance of
legitimacy to a closed, non-transparent system that is antithetical to
Wikimedia development principles."
I would see the community joining TDF to help improve and develop a better process. Without experiencing and having a firsthand understanding of how things are done, how can the community contribute to improving the process?
TDF is not hiding anything from the community. We are always working on improving the process. We are learning to walk and there are times we stumbled but we need to pick ourselves up and try again.
I am into productivity and improvement on what we are trying to do. I can see this cycle of frustration is not being productive at all. I would like for you and Brian to have a video conference call with me so we can see how to make this a productive process. I can clear a couple of hours this Friday for us. If you need more time please let me know. It would be even better if we can meet in person. If you are near the WMF office in San Francisco, I can book us a meeting room and I'll drive to the city to meet you. If you aren't in the area, I can fly out to wherever you are, on my own dime. I know we are all working toward the same goal, but our approaches are misaligned. We just need to work together. Email me directly,
lnguyen@wikimedia.org, so we can set up a time to meet. To be transparent and productive, we can record our meeting, in person or on google meet, and share it with the community. Any community member who feels they have ideas to improve the process, please I invite you to email me directly. We can also have 1:1 if that makes it easier for you. I'm looking forward to meeting you and getting to know you better.
See you soon,
Linh