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

[Florence Devouard]

Erik Moeller wrote:
> 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. :-)

eh !
Thank you for summarizing the thoughts. Saved me time :-)

ant