[Foundation-l] (correction) Re: Notice of the results of the WMF Board of Trustees election

[Thomas Dalton]

> In no way am I criticizing the election, but I think at least one of the
> member of the board should be from a wiki not in the top 4-10. After all the
> board represents us all and not just the top 4. Just an idea? What do you
> think?

The only way I can see that we could do that is with some kind of
constituency system. Projects are grouped together in some way so that
we have as many equal sized groups as there are seats available. Each
group then elects one person from that group to the board.

I think this would only work if the board was significantly enlarged.
I'd say 6 or 7 elected seats would be a minimum, otherwise the groups
would be too large. There would also be a significant difficulty in
working out how to group the projects (should all projects in the same
language go together, or should all Wiktionarys go together, or
what?). The other thing to consider is that we would have a board
where the board members are representing a particular subgroup of the
community which runs the risk of increasing conflict within the board
(the Wiktionary members wants to spend the extra publicity money on
Wiktionary, the Asian languages member wants to spend it in Asia,
etc.). That increased conflict might be worth it to get smaller
projects the attention they need, but I doubt it.