[Foundation-l] Restricting Appointed members (Proposal).

[Geoffrey Plourde]

Which proposal are you calling a failure? 


----- Original Message ----
From: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 10:59:29 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Restricting Appointed members (Proposal).

Hoi,
I do not want to have our board or any body be dumbed down. Please, when we
are to chose people to represent us let them people who understand what the
f***k they are talking about and who understand what the impact is of what
is proposed and what is considered. The last thing we want is to have a
group of people, properly democratically elected, that do not have a clue
what it is that they are doing.

The Wikimedia Foundation does not have members. Making the WMF a member
based organisation is NOT what is being proposed. What is proposed is giving
the community a way in which it can make for a more coherent way of running
the projects. When this means that there is a need for involvement of the
WMF organisation, it will be something that needs to be discussed with the
organisation and possibly with the board. When you make this proposal a
power play, you will not achieve what you hope to achieve.

In my opinion, we have an organisation that is working its arse off to make
sure that we have the budget so that they stay in a job and we will get the
things done as proposed in the budget. The board is responsible for the
oversight of the organisation and it has the power to enforce certain
requirements on the projects.

In the mean time there is nobody who really cares about the existing
projects who will consider request like the one for the closure of the Tatar
Wikipedia. The one thing where we really suck is in the management of our
projects. When this proposal is only seen in terms of power, I consider this
proposal a complete failure. When we want to give our projects, our
communities more involvement then the first thing it has to do is get our
act together and make sure that our projects, communities are sane and the
universal requirements are implemented on all our projects for all the
languages. You do not do this by telling the organisation, the board how to
do *their *job.
Thanks,
    GerardM

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 3/17/08, effe iets anders <effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you have a seperate body in place, such as the VC, there might be no
> need
> >  for such requirement, as there would be another way to control the
> >  foundtaion more directly. We should not put these requirements in just
> to
> >  put them in, but only if they are useful. Therefore, I think it is best
> to
> >  await the developments on the VC side. There seems to be no hurry with
> >  regards to the number of volunteers anyway?
>
> Community control over WMF bodies is necessary whatever is number of
> those bodies. If someone made bad decisions, they should be
> responsible at the next elections. This is an extremely simple
> principle of representative democracy. However, this is not
> implemented coherently in the bylaws.
>
> And this may be implemented in (at least) three ways: (1) To give the
> right to the elected members to appoint and remove expert members, (2)
> to limit powers and proportion of the appointed members or (3) to move
> all expertize out of the Board, to payed professionals (I prefer this
> option).
>
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