[Foundation-l] Congrats to Erik, and my own response to his RfC

[Jimmy Wales]

Congrats to Erik, and here are my own thoughts of how his particular 
strengths could best be applied.  I got this stuff by going through his 
candidate statement and pulling out the things that I personally think 
are both the most important and exciting and which match his interests 
and skills.

Erik, I hope you find this helpful.

1.  Openness - I think the entire board is strongly in support of 
openness and transparency, and in particular with respect to committee 
processes.  The difficulty has been in how to properly balance openness 
with the need for privacy and discretion in certain matters.  Your first 
platform plank was to work on "a clear and sensible proposal as to how 
we can guarantee transparency, openness, participation and 
accountability within these Wikimedia committees."  Bravo!

2. "To avoid both extremes, we need to build a diverse Board whose 
members are trained to resolve conflicts" - bravo again.  I hope that 
you will support me in efforts to quickly expand the board to include 
not only more people from the community, but also people who can help us 
in other ways with professional expertise and/or public credibility. 
Obviously, this is to be a hot topic for the October board retreat, and 
quite possibly sooner.

3. Developing world projects - I strongly support that we, as a 
community and organization, turn our attention increasingly to a more 
global perspective.  We know that the elections for the board (just to 
cite one example) were heavily skewed towards the European languages, 
and specifically Western and Northern European languages.

It is easy to make a prediction: within 10 years, Arabic Wikipedia (just 
to pick one example) will be larger than German Wikipedia (for instance) 
today.  This means that world projects should be a top priority, and I 
think one of your best skills has always been to guide large scale 
proposals (wikinews for example) to broad community acceptance.  I hope 
that you will focus a lot on that.