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

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On 3/20/08, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> 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.

Indeed. A good example is the Alfred Nobel Foundation. Good old Alfred
would be utterly scandalized by how his money had been misappropriated in
giving out his literature prize to authors of the rankest nihilistic
and/or barbarously
cynical bent (likely he would also be sorely dissapointed at the Norvegians not
having the wisdom to confer the peace prize to a Swede every other year).



Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]