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

[Delirium]

Erik Moeller wrote:
> In such a model, a Board of people with decades of non-profit
> experience provides the necessary "last protection" for the
> Foundation: protection against mismanagement, support of
> sustainability efforts, protection against violation of core values,
> etc. This does not mean that these people have to have 10,000 edits in
> the projects. They could come from education, from projects assisting
> developing nations, from the technology sector. But they would have
> one thing in common: experience safeguarding _organizations_, rather
> than wikis.
>   

Someone with experience safeguarding organizations in a general sense is 
not guaranteed to fundamentally agree with us on what sort of 
organization we'd like Wikimedia to be, though. And the track record for 
this sort of thing is not all that good--- A whole lot of professionally 
managed non-profit organizations drift once they're taken over by 
professional management, or are even essentially taken over by the staff 
in an entryist manner, diverging strongly from their original purpose. 
This happens especially when a strong ideological guiding voice is not 
there or leaves (for example, charitable foundations set up by 
individuals almost always drift very badly once the founder dies, as the 
now-mostly-autonomous trustees direct the money to their own preferred 
ends).

The only real safeguard against that is to get people who strongly and 
personally agree with the *mission*. Thus if you wanted to safeguard an 
environmental organization's long-term direction, for example, you would 
only allow committed environmentalists on the board---not people with 
strong professional credentials but no demonstrated history of 
committment to environmental causes.

-Mark