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

[Erik Moeller]

On 3/13/08, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  This would suggest that the board could evolve to be a body essentially
>  populated with professionals rather than community members.
>
>  With the co-existence of two bodies, both with a decision making authority.

I think that is exactly the right direction to go, as it's a logical
continuation of what has already happened on all levels of the
organization: people's roles and responsibilities become more and more
closely aligned with their core competencies. And that's a normal part
of organizational growth: In the beginning, everyone _has_ to do
everything, and roles and competencies tend to become mixed up.

As a community, we've built one of the largest websites of the world
on a shoestring budget, not to mention the development of the
MediaWiki software itself, which has become adopted by thousands of
sites around the world. We haven't commercialized, we haven't
compromised. We've done well.

But there are challenges, both on the organizational level and in the
community. For example, in the community, we do not really have
clarity about
- how we decide that a certain software feature can be activated, or
that a particular partnership is OK,
- who the community actually is, and how we drive more participation,
- how to properly provide oversight for the use of the various
community privileges like "checkuser", "oversight", etc.
- what the relationships between chapters and communities will evolve into,
- what to do when a community becomes dysfunctional, and how to
resolve conflicts beyond the scope of a single project becomes
necessary,
- what the future of our smaller projects will be, what
reorganizations may be needed, and what new initiatives we may want to
focus on
etc. etc.

These are all the kinds of challenges that I would hope a V.C. could
address, if not solve. On the organizational level, we have the known
challenges: We need to assess the performance of the Executive
Director effectively, evaluate the financial reports, approve the
budget and long term goals, raise funds, be able to hire a new
competent Executive Director if the current one leaves or is hit by a
truck, etc. This is an oversimplification, but IMO the Board's job, in
this view of the responsibilities, would be primarily to ensure that
the organization is not insane, and that it can be sustained. It would
not be the principal driver of change -- that would be the Staff and
the Volunteers.

There are then two critical questions:
1) How do we prevent the Board from becoming an entity that "sells
out" the values that are shared among volunteers and, hopefully to the
same degree, among staff?
2) How do we choose the members of the Board & Council?

In answer to 1), I think Mike's help will be critical - we might need
to specify certain limitations in the Bylaws, for example. Even with
such explicit provisions, we'll want to be careful who the initial
Board members would be - I'd prefer to have at least some
professionals who have existing ties to the organization, and perhaps
also to have an acculturation process for new Board members.

In answer to 2), I think effe's idea of starting with an Interim
Volunteer Council is brilliant, and I would suggest that for an
interim period, the current Board serves on both bodies.This would
then allow for a gradual professionalization of the Board of Trustees
while the V.C. itself is being developed.

These are just some first thoughts. But this discussion really fills
me with hope after the negativity of the last days: I think that we're
finding some common ground about the future of the organization and
about the self-governance of the community. :-)
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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