[Foundation-l] Board-announcement: Board Restructuring

[Anthony]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 2:07 PM, Tim Landscheidt <tim at tim-landscheidt.de> wrote:
>  Or, in other words: There is no
>  power because you cannot give orders to volunteers.
>
This meme is oft-repeated but still untrue.  Almost every volunteer
organization has a hierarchy and "gives orders" to its members to some
extent.  Its members are, of course, free to ignore those "orders",
but the organization is then free to disallow them from further
participation.

Seriously, what volunteer organization can you think of where
volunteers are told to just do whatever they feel like?  Does the
Obama campaign committee give volunteers a bunch of blank signs and
say "go support Obama", or do they assign people to particular routes
and ask them to follow particular rules while canvassing?

The Wikimedia Foundation may run this way, and maybe it's even a good
way of running things, but it's certainly not impossible to do it any
other way.