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

[Ray Saintonge]

Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
>> I would not laugh. I would cry. Because it would mean that we have been
>> unable to get a full representivity. As I stated before, it is imho very
>> important to have a full coverage from all corners of the volunteers. It
>> may
>> be obvious that I do not see internal-l as "all volunteers", so it is
>> indeed
>> important to have a significant portion of members from the
>> non-internal-l.
>>     
> Should not we first define on what the full representivity means? All big
> projects? Different languages? Different roles in the home projects?
> Different types of the projects: wp vs ws vs wn etc? One way (possibly not
> the best one) of dealing with this would be to reserve, you know, one
> place for smaller wp's, one place for wn representatives etc. Another way
> would be just to let people elect they want to elect, but then we should
> not be surprised if after all all council members are native English
> speakers and are active in en.wp as their home project.
I don't think we can define that ahead of time. Certainly the 500 or so 
Wiki-projects are not all equally active, and a 500 member Council would 
have a hard time focusing on anything.  Making sure there is at least 
one person from each major project group is relatively easy, because 
there aren't too many to deal with.  Allowing the Provincial Council to 
add more members after the initial appointments will serve such a 
purpose.  Some of the needed people may not yet be identified by the 
time of the Board resolution on this.  Native English domination is 
unlikely, although some reasonable facility with English is often a fact 
of life when you want to get something done, and we do have many people 
who are not native English speakers but who handle the language 
remarkably well.

Your suggestion of a bias in favour of native English speakers is just a 
little cynical.  For a variety of reasons a bias in the other direction 
seems more likely.  Only three of the current seven Board members are 
native English speakers. 

We are in a bootstrapping process.  That means that some of the 
decisions that must be made before a Provisional Council is appointed 
cannot be made until after it is appointed. :-)     That's what makes a 
two-step approach so valuable.

Ec