[Foundation-l] Board-announcement: Board Restructuring

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

I have already asked this question on meta (and got a response from Ziko,
which I am however not to happy with).

A real life example.

I am a Russian citizen, mostly contributing to ru.wp, and I am an admin on
ru.wp

I reside in the Netherlands and I have smth like 10 edits on nl.wp
(probably  there will be more coming, but at the time I have no interest
in nl.wp meta-issues).

I have whatsoever no connection with the (potentially upcoming) ru
chapter, and I would be definitely not able to attend the meetings etc.

What chapter does represent me, even in the long run?

Note that three out of 5 bureaucrats of ru.wp reside abroad (2 in Germany,
1 in Belgium), and two of them have never been (and probably will never
become) Russian citizens or residents.

Cheers
Yaroslav

>>  You are absolutely correct Mark.
>>  But you may not have understood that chapters will not necessarily
>> elect
>>  chapter members ?
>>  I even have the weakness to think that they will have the wisdom to
>>  avoid that trap ;-)
>
> Hopefully so,$B!!(Band Kurt seems to show such a wisdom already (and you
> are also WMFR Board member, right?), so in a short time it would be
> okay (or am I too optimistic?), but for a long run, I'm not sure the
> scheme announced is the best composition and schedule.
>
> Several brainstormig ideas:
> * Why not having the "chapter seats" as of appointed ones and keep the
> community vote seats in the current number or so?
> * Why distribute into 3/2/1/4? Why not 4/2/ ...  and have the
> community to elect 2 in one year?
> * Why (always) need 4 appointed? (I think it was already brought
> up...) why not say "up to 4"?
> etc etc.
>
> The chapter seats may have many implications. It may be seen as an
> alternative of current  community seats, so from this view, it could
> be seen as reduced the power of community, specially when one have no
> near future possibility to settle a chapter in his land (e.g. PRC Main
> Land, excluding HK and Macau). Reflecting more thought from the
> chapters, in respect to their experience, is fine. But reducing the
> representation of the rest of community is not always fine.
>
> However, I have another thought it wouldn't make the situation change
> drastically at least at this moment: my gray cell units whispers
> "anyway most of votes come from the project whose volunteers or at
> least some of them have formed a chapter or more?" And I am tempting
> to say "yeah, exactly" .... For 2007: top ten projects of voters were
> en [UK and now Austria], de [DE, CH and now AU], fr [FR, CH], it [IT,
> CH], pl, nl [NL], ja, commons, no [now NO], es [now AR and we know
> already some planning chapters] . Only ja has no chapter even in the
> plan, and we may remove commons for this consideration because of
> their service project characteristic.. In top twenty, we will find
> also he and zh. sv and sr had relatively small numbers of voters (10
> and 8 respectively) but anyway there are many projects which had no
> voter at all).
>
> I won't say the issue of overweight is purely theoretical, since I
> believe the composition of Board should be considered carefully, both
> in a short term and in a long run. But even such consideration is
> genuine theoretical, it should be based on facts we know and have
> faced. I think I don't so much like of this chapter seat and its
> distribution ideas, but currently I won't reject it simply either.
>
> Re: community election schedule. As a past election committee member I
> tend to support a election in every two years, because of overhead of
> election process, but on the other hand, I believe the basic idea of
> having an election every year is good to keep the BoT composition to
> reflect the  latest community concerns, specially considering the
> possibility the chapter seats will be able to be taken by people not
> coming from the community.
>
> And my first question was: is there any potential problem to have
> other orgs (legally chapters are other orgs based in another country,
> at least at that moment, right?) voices to select WMF BoT and not vice
> versa? I suppose the Board had consulted Mike and he nodded, but I
> would love to get further explanation.
>
> --
> KIZU Naoko
> http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese)
> Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD
>
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