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

[Thomas Dalton]

On 13/03/2008, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 8:33 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > >  While the a particular project (like English Wikinews) should be
>  >  >  represented according to the size of the community, languages should
>  >  >  be represented unproportionally, possibly one delegate per one
>  >  >  language with at least one active project.
>  >
>  >  That would certainly be nice. If you're going to have that many
>  >  languages represented, I think it becomes essential to have everyone
>  >  speak at least reasonable English - translating everything into lots
>  >  of languages will not be practical. (I say English, it could be any
>  >  language, but I think English is likely to have the most speakers.)
>  >
>  >
>
> *cough* European Parliament *cough*

If memory serves (I haven't looked it up), the European parliament has
about 3 official languages - it doesn't try and use every language
spoken in Europe for everything. And, to the extent that it does
translate things, it uses a large team of professional translators and
spends God knows how much money on it.

>  >  I'm not sure 500-700 is practical in the middle to far future either.
>  >  There would need to be an additional tier if we were going to get that
>  >  large - a council of 30-60 (say) and a general assembly of 500-700
>  >  which only meets (virtually) once of twice a year.
>
> Something like the UN where the security council is selected for a
>  certain period by the general assembly?

Vaguely, but I don't think the UN is a good analogy. The UN is a
collection of countries each with a large amount of personal power.
We're talking about a collection of individual representatives with no
power of their own. But, as far as your analogy goes, it's fairly
accurate. I'm not recommending such a system in the near future,
though - let's stick to a single, small council for now.