[Foundation-l] Board-announcement: Board Restructuring

[Chad]

Honestly, a few months participating in the projects hands on
would give the Board and staff a much better idea of who they're
working for. It's not for your large donors. It's not for potential
venture capitalists. It's not for any of the reasons or people
that seem to recently be the focus of the WMF.

In case you all have forgotten, you work for the community. The
community is not the tight-knit group who post on Foundation-l
or contribute to meta. The community also isn't the pre-approved
list of people allowed to post via the approved mediums (read: PR
channels, such as Planet Wikimedia or the WMF Blog). The
community also isn't defined by what the ED's staff or Board says
it is.

The community is the millions of anonymous and pseudo-anonymous
contributors who've put their work into the projects to give a staff a nice
fat paycheck and let the Board pussyfoot their way around proper
governance.

Out of curiosity: If the entire Board and staff were put up to a public vote
across /all/ projects (assuming good representation could be assured),
I wonder how many of them would be with the WMF at the end of the day.

For free content,
Chad

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 5:08 AM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Kwan Ting Chan wrote:
>  > On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 07:54 +0300, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
>  >
>  >> I have an idle thought. If there are to be seats elected by
>  >> a limited circle of projects with chapters, would not the
>  >> easiest manner of balancing things be that people from
>  >> projects with chapters not be able to vote in the other
>  >> elections from the community. In this fashion the so called
>  >> "community" seats would be transformed into "chapterless
>  >> community seats".
>  >>
>  >> Note that this proposal has the virtue that this would not
>  >> disenfranchise nearly all the _individuals_ who contribute
>  >> to projects with chapters, as many of them contribute in
>  >> multiple languages, and thus may have an voting-eligble
>  >> account in a smaller language without chapter.
>  >
>  > No, just no.
>  >
>  > This *will* be disenfranchising all the people who contribute, some
>  > quite a lot, for the simple reason that they are not involved with the
>  > chapter in their respective country. I will argue that many contributor
>  > in fact _do not_ contribute in multiple language.
>  >
>  > KTC
>
>
>  I have to agree with KTC.
>  This issue was actually discussed in length with Sue when she joined the
>  staff. She believed that we could consider chapters represented all
>  editors of a given nation, whilst the Foundation would represent all the
>  un-represented nations. But that would suppose that all editors of a
>  nation actually feel (or want to be) represented by the local chapter.
>  This is not the case.
>
>  Ant
>
>
>
>
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