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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
As one of the vocal proponents of the "other" languages in our projects, you
may be surprised that I am of the opinion that it is most important to keep
in mind that the representation of language and culture is in many ways does
not help us achieve our goals. Our goal is to provide people with free
knowledge. The representation of people of "other" languages and the
representation of cultural backgrounds be they national, religious or
otherwise is only a method to ensure that our neutral point of view is
maintained.

Having a fair representation of all the factions that divide our world is
something that is attempted at great cost in the UN and, it does not really
work. When you look at the composition of our board, you will find people
from many countries they all have their often unspecified background. The
only thing in their background that has been discussed is nationality and
that has been divisive enough.

When we are to discuss the composition of a board a council, it is important
to understand its goals. With these goals in mind we can start to define
what people are best for what body. When the goal is to provide the
compulsory oversight for a foundation, it makes sense that the people
involved understand the US/California laws that have to be complied with,
understand the processes needed in the ORGANISATION that has its office in
San Francisco. People working in the organisation need to be professional in
what they do, they have to understand what it is the foundation stands for
and what the projects are working towards. A council is to me more of a
think tank, trying to understand what it is that we can and should do
differently and may have the power to make the occasional difference.

This does not mean and in my opinion should not mean that this is the whole
of how things get done. The chapters, the projects are all to a large extend
autonomous, they decide within certain boundaries how they do what they do.
Even the language committee does its thing fairly autonomously and leaves it
only to the WMF board to give final approval.

There is a need for a platform. A platform where things are discussed,
decided. The implementation is typically done by others. What I am afraid of
is that the distance between the people that do and the people that talk
will increase. This is why I agree with effeietsanders that a period to
experiment would be a good thing; we should not set things in stone from the
start, we need to find out what works. As projects continue to grow, as new
projects are added regularly, it is become more problematic to keep
everything within the limits of the freedoms that have geen given.

My fear is that the council will be this idealistic talk shop that will be
as divisive as many of the things that went before. What I welcome is a body
that aims to be first and foremost practical. That does not talk in terms of
saving the world by providing information but talks in terms of what we do
today and what we aim to do tomorrow to provide information to all the
people of the world.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 7:39 AM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
> > I'm not saying elections are always the best choice, but unless things
> > actually do start to turn out badly, I don't think it makes sense to
> > assume that anything done by vote among Wikimedia projects will result
> > in the worst case of sectarianism. Most of us base our vote *much* more
> > on how much we agree with each candidate on the future of the
> > organization than we do on whether we happen to come from the same
> country.
> >
> > -Mark
>
> I agree with Mark.
>
> I think trying to vote to give representativity along linguistic lines
> would result in much distress
> * deciding of the number of representant for each language (likely to
> create tensions between languages, 2 for you, 3 for me etc...)
> * might result in poor candidacies in small languages/projects (limited
> pool of candidates)
> * will result in an unworkable set (300-500 representants)
> * will prevent cross pollination of candidates (an english native might
> prefer to vote for a french speaking candidate, but will not be able)
> * will result in a new board member (or council member) thinking he
> represents only a language community rather than the entire community.
>
> I also think that many of us would prefer to vote for someone who has a
> view beyond his native community, who has already made the effort to get
> involved at the meta level.
>
> I am fully sensitive to discrimination issues. But I do not think that
> the solution to discrimination is to reserve places to the discriminated
> ones (or perceived as such). The solution is to make sure so-called
> discriminated are given the opportunity to join the meta level, and to
> communicate with other linguistic communities, and to promote themselves
> through the type of activities they are involved in (perhaps helping to
> handle the press, perhaps helping in organizing Wikimania, perhaps
> helping with translations, perhaps helping to provide leaflets) etc...
>
>
> ant
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>