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

[geni]

On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> 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!
>

Err you might want to watch certain episodes of yes minister before
using phrasing like that. You risk worrying a section of the brits.

> 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.
>

Any chance of some librarians?

> 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.
>

Stand by for some more if EU enlargement has the effect it normaly does.

> 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.

Well it would be if most major arabic speaking countries were not
blocking us by 2008. Still I'm sure we will handle that.

-- 
geni