[Foundation-l] Volunteer Council - A shot for a resolution

[Milos Rancic]

On 3/13/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> If the council is truly representative, then a referendum is (at least
>  roughly) equivalent to just letting the council decide (which would be
>  a hell of a lot easier). Do we want to have the unqualified masses
>  deciding when they should and shouldn't defer to expert opinion? I
>  guess it depends on how much we trust the experts...

My picture of the relations inside of WM in the future is something like:

- The Board should have representative, chapters' and expert members.

- Representative members of the Board should be chosen at more or less
the same way like we are choosing board members now.

- Chapters' members should be chosen (somehow) by chapters.

- All others are expert members, which should be chosen by the Council
or by representative and chapters' members of the Board according to
some rules. So, let's say that community is choosing 5 members of the
board, chapters are choosing 3 members. Those 8 members would appoint
5 expert members more or -- 5 expert members would be chosen by the
Council. And more or less, this is a theoretical description of the
present situation. (BTW, I assume that Domas is, for example, an
expert member.)

- The Council should have only representative members, but mathematics
for making a good representative body is not so simple. We need
representatives of different language-based projects, different types
of projects; developers of MediaWiki (but, other in-house or
around-house software, too) we even need representatives of WMF Office
in San Francisco. It is, also, important that even if one community
has almost a clear relation with one country and, according to that,
with a chapters, if it exists -- chapters and communities don't
correlate between each other -- so, we would need some representatives
from chapters inside of the Council, too.

And if it is so and the Board and the Council have different opinions
about authority -- then it is a political (representative) question,
not an expert question -- which means that decision should be made on
a political level.

And if you are skeptical about reasonableness of the community,
community may decide only which body has authority.

>  >  BTW, I am sure that we will need a judicial body in the future, too.
>
> I'm for from sure of that. It's possible, but unless we end up with
>  far more rules at the foundation level which are binding on the
>  community (as opposed to just the staff and board), then it won't be
>  needed. Most rules that are binding on the community are at the
>  project level, and arbcoms can handle the judicial side of things.

Actually, something like Supreme Court was on my mind -- as an option
for dealing with the previous question. However, it is true that we
are very far away of that.