[Foundation-l] VC - alternative resolution

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >...want to say one more thing: Without VC all suggestions made by
> >members of the community are non-mandatory for the Board and the Board
>  >is solely responsible for driving everything related to Wikimedia.
>  >Only after creation of VC community members will be able to have
>  >influence over other things than choosing an admin or a checkuser or
>  >even a part of board members.
>
>  I took this to be a criticism, that is that you would expect the VC to
>  correct the lack of mandatory power over the Board.

Maybe I am not wording well my thoughts... Almost exclusively I am
talking about community/content issues. When I am mentioning non
community/content issues, I am usually talking about a need for
transparency of Board's and Office's work. This is (almost) the end of
my interest in Board's matters.

With VC community members would be able to articulate its own will out
of the project level. Those matters are very wide, but doesn't assume
a general mandatory power over the Board. Actually, it does assume
more power to VC than to the Board in some matters, but in the past
year the Board wasn't be interested in such issues (or, at least, it
was taking a lot of time and pressure to the Board to make any
reaction). The example is closure of Siberian Wikipedia: AFAIK, only
after an extensive talk at this list, I think that the Board made
decision to close it (LangSubCom doesn't have the right to close any
project).

Imagine a community/content-related issue which is out of the scope of
one project. Today we may endlessly talk about maybe a big problem
with a lot of consequences, but we are not able to solve it. With VC
we would be able to address such problem.

And I realized now what was the exact meaning of my words which you
quoted: We may talk here endlessly, but we would have a mechanism for
doing something only after the creation of VC. Until that point
everything is in the Board's hands (i.e., talk here is not mandatory
for the Board). So, if you/whoever have more trust to the Board than
to the members of PVC -- may keep to trust to the Board. After PVC
finishes the job, you/whoever will have a possibility to trust to
yourself/whoeverself and choose members of VC in some way (or to be a
member of VC), which will deal with community issues (with implicitly
or explicitly mandatory power over *some* of the issues which was
usually not well addressed by the Board).

So, the meaning of my "(non-)mandatory" has a very specific, not general sense.