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

[Yann Forget]

Hello,

Samuel Klein wrote:
> 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.

I agree with Samuel here.
We should be imaginative when searching for governance models, and not 
focusing too much on face to face bodies. After all, we are essentially 
a online community.

1. There is no need for real life meetings for the Council to be effective.

2. There is no need to have a one-day decision system, so we can look 
for other procedures than a Parliament type vote.

3. There is no need for real time translations. We also have time to 
organise this body into subgroups which can then deal with pratical 
subjects / projects.

I envision a body of 150-200 members in 3-4 years time. This should 
allow for a better represention of small projects than 5 elected people 
to the board. The most difficult task will be to find inventive ways to 
so that representativity is shared by big and small projects. In some 
cases, it seems easy: for example, all Indian languages and projects 
together could share a common voice, among a few people. The provisional 
council will need to have diplomatic skills so that small projects feel 
that they have been taken into account.

Regards,

Yann

>>  > 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.

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