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

[Milos Rancic]

On 3/13/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.)

If someone wants to participate in decision-making process which is of
common interest, they should know the common language at least at some
basic level (clear "Tarzan English" is good enough for communication).

> 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.

When I was thinking about a large body, I was thinking about a virtual
body. Maybe, some day in the future, when WMF would be able to pay
trips for the whole body annually, it would be able to meet somewhere,
possibly during Wikimania.

Usefulness of such huge body is related, also, to a positive of
smaller projects (actually, all except English and German
Wikipedias!), as well as helping to really small projects to be
represented. So, instead of having electoral which would be something
like 50% en.wp, 12% de.wp, 5% fr.wp, 5% es.wp, 3% fr.wp and 25% the
rest of the world, including, for example, Chinese and Hindu
Wikipedias and Commons represented with 0.01% -- we would get
electoral body where we would be able to hear voices of all projects.

The other issue (which I described at the talk page) is that even if
we say that all languages should have one representative and to give
to every project one representative (something like 1000) *now*, we
would get at most something like 200 representatives. But, as I
remember, my proposition was something like (at the example of Serbian
language projects): all sr: projects are getting one representative
because of language + one more for sr.wp (less than 100 active users
at October 2006). All other projects are represented via language
representative or via project representative. Which means: if Serbian
language projects have 2 representatives (wp is around 25th place),
count that below 50th place all language projects would have one
representative per language. And we should be happy if we find any
representative for languages which Wikipedia is below 100th place.

So, the job of the Provisional Council should be to create a plan for
adopting more members into the Council and how it would be
implemented. Here are a couple of scratches for issues which should be
addressed:

- Mandate of delegates should be yearly (or for N years)...
- The first elected representative should be consisted of 1
representative for every project type (Wikipedia, Wikinews, Commons,
MediaWiki...), 3 for languages which have more than 100 millions of
speaker and more then 100 active users on at least one active
Wikimedian project, 1 for languages which have more than 10 millions
of speakers and at least one active WM project and 10 representatives
for all others. (Which would be something like 50 members.)...
- If everything is going fine, the second generation of the Council
should move limit of 10 millions of speakers and at least one active
WM project to 1 million of speakers and at least one active project...
- The first elected body should have two working bodies:
self-regulation body and community-regulation body...
- The second elected body should have NPOV policy and NPOV
implementation body...
- The third elected body should have encyclopedic policy and
encyclopedic implementation body...
- When NPOV and encyclopedic bodies become stable enough they should
form independent Content Council...

I put here some random issues and I gave some approximate (maybe even
wrong) answers. The point was just to illustrate what do I think about
the Provisional Council's job.

While some kind of central body (30-60 persons) may be useful (and may
be the right path), I didn't think about making a concept of
assembly-government inside of the Council because I don't think that
it is necessary. while I think that particular working bodies are
necessary. Of course, maybe your approach may better: it should be
analyzed.

The other (I think very) relevant issue here is that we would get a
few hundreds of persons who are deeply involved in building our global
community. And they would do that *together*.

While community members have responsibility to only one real side (WM
committee is responsible only to the Board), we wouldn't have enough
people enough motivated to work on building the global community. When
responsibility is two-sided (Council itself and community which
delegated a member), I am sure that all sides would be much more
motivated to keep the community in a good direction.