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

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 7:36 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14/03/2008, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > no English means no participation?  That part I definitely disagree with.
>
>  What's you alternative suggestion, then? Are you willing to pay for
>  all the real time translators?

Translators for what?  I haven't heard a clear description of what
people would be working on, elaborating, or developing that would be
improved by everyone speaking a single language to one another.    If
we have a group of people who care strongly about improving the
cross-project community, does it matter what language each participant
speaks?

"Making sure each participant can express themselves and be understood
by others" is a fine requirement, requires no real-time translation,
an can be satisfied by collaboration among members with perhaps a few
interpreters in extreme cases.  "Making everyone communicate in one
language" is not.

>  > How about all languages having as many representatives as want to and
>  >  have time to participate?  What is the advantage of shutting people
>  >  out?  Please help me understand a single use case in detail.
>
>  The whole point of this idea is to have a group of limited size that
>  can decide things that is isn't practical to have decided by a

Again, I have yet to hear a requirement for this body that can't be
satisfied by the coherent efforts, information-gathering, and
organized communication of "at least a hundred people" with time to
dedicate to the global community.  Where does "making [binding]
decisions for others" come in?  Please provide a specific class of
situations that you would like to see such a closed group address.

>  consensus of the entire Wikimedia community. If you let anyone in,
>  then it's precisely equivalent to having the entire community.

Or at least a self-selected open subset of the entire community that
is interestd in willing in participating in a specific forum.

>  > Since we're already talking about this with some relish, how about
>  >  making this the jof of People Who Care About The Idea, without waiting
>  >  for the bureaucracy and lossy intermediation of setting up a
>  >  provisional council?
>
>  Because a discussion of random people isn't generally a good way to
>  actually get something done. It generates ideas, but it can be very

How are the people in this discussion random?  If you define aspects
of randomness that keep this group from being more ideal, we can reach
out to more groups and make the discussion better.  So far I see no
way in which what we are talking about now would not be improved by
the collaboration of many more interested nad devoted people.

>  difficult to implement those ideas. Sooner or later, someone has to
>  stand up and declare "this is how its going to be" - the provisional
>  council is intended to be that someone (well, someones).

I don't think that declaring "how its going to be" is a useful
function of such a body.  If anything, this would be
counterproductive, disempowering, and prone to arriving at and forcing
upon others a Wrong Version that they are told they should not even
dispute.


>  > How about "at least 1, and as many as are interested and able"?
>  >  Unless you mean for this to be a body dedicated to numerical voting...
>
>  Like any similar body, it will be discussion followed by a vote.
>  Discussion is impossible in a very large group - see my reply further
>  up in this email.

Can you name one or two similar bodies that work well and do
approximately what you have in mind?


>  > I don't know what to say to this.   These are things that every
>  >  community member on every project participate in now.  Why would you
>  >  want to disempower them?
>
>  Logistics. At the moment, nothing much gets done since its impossible
>  to truly establish a consensus.

Please list specific examples, indicating how inability to establish
consensus underlies a standing bottleneck.  I claim that, to the
contrary, most bottlenecks exist because no sufficiently good solution
has yet been suggested, or because some people are unhappy with a
reasonably good status quo and there is a lingering debate about
whether to switch [or switch back].

SJ

ps - Every time these discussions arise, people use the claim that
"nothing gets done" as a reason for imposing the will of a closed
group on a large one.  Well, for any large set of desired projects,
some will have successful plans for implementation and some will not
yet.

You discount the tremendously effective, open and consensus-based
efforts to write neutral and encyclopedic prose, develop useful and
effective annotation models, assess and limit trolls and vandals,
maintain a unified central media repository for projects, maintain a
high-quality and rapidly changing front page, update open-task lists,
categorize and rate articles, or any of the thousands of other
difficult tasks carried out by our heterogenous fellow-contributors.