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

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 8:23 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>  Our election process is designed to identify people of integrity and
>  commitment and passion; these are the key attributes that have allowed
>  us to remain radical, open & independent. It is not designed, however,
>  to measure specific qualifications related to some of the roles above.
>  For example, it is not designed to find someone with accounting or
>  management experience.

I'm my opinion, "Integrity and commitment and passion" are the most
important aspects of being a board member, and "radical, open &
independent" are some of the highest ideals towards which we can
strive. I'm not willing to sacrifice passion or commitment for a board
member with more experience or more qualifications. Some people might,
but I am not. I am also--as people have probably noted by now--not
willing to draw a line in the sand and say "we are radical enough, or
open enough, and we don't need to become more of either". The projects
and the content come first and foremost, if I have to rank things, and
the community is a close second. Moving either of these things out of
the highest priority is highly antithetical to everything we've ever
stood for. The best board members are going to have the most passion
and zeal for our mission, and outsiders are simply not going to have
these qualities in any demonstrable amount.

>  Just an example: It's very hard to do good hiring for a
>  position whose background is completely different from your own.
>  ... Similarly, to hire a
>  competent Executive Director, it helps to have significant experience
>  in the management of non-profit organizations. And so forth.

I disagree with this. Board membership may not require a resume or
specific qualifications, but the ED position very well might. You
don't need to be a non-profit expert to know a well-qualified
individual when shown the proper information. The current board
certainly doesn't have a lot of non-profit management experience, and
they seemed to have picked a great ED in Sue. Good candidates for such
a position will be self evident, and will have enough documentation to
demonstrate their goodness.

>  We need to get over the idea that the Board somehow has to be deeply
>  connected to
>  - the project communities
>  - the day-to-day questions facing the Foundation.

Fundamental disagreement here. The foundation is the community. We are
a group of people who donates time and energy to create content.
Without the community we have no content, without the content we have
no purpose.The purpose of the board is to oversee the projects and to
hire staff. The purpose of the staff is to keep the projects running.
Everything comes back to the projects (which are combinations of
content and community), and so we need board members who are
intimately familar with them. You say that it's difficult to make a
hiring decision in an area that you have no experience in. That's
precisely why we need board members who are involved in the projects,
so that they are the most able to hire staff members to operate them.

>  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.

This is, perhaps, a great argument for a mixed board, but certainly
not one for a board which is devoid of community members. Our
community members are most knowledgable about the needs of our
communities. Our members know our strengths and our weaknesses, our
trials and tribulations, our methods. Board members who have
experience in some vague "projects assisting developing nations" are
no better suited for our needs then board members who have experience
in race car driving, or parachuting, or scuba diving. I gave a
presentation yesterday about Wikibooks to a group of professionals
from "the technology sector", and most of them were absolutely
bewildered by the kinds of things that I was talking about. People who
do not understand us cannot possibly be expected to help us or to
guide us.

As an example, Brion wouldn't hire a developer who didn't have
experience with our technologies, but who had plenty of experience in
other areas. Brion isn't going to hire people right now who don't have
experience in server administration, or in the software tools that we
use, or the programming languages that our software is written in.

>  From everything we know, Wikimedia is a very young, proud, geeky
>  community. And it's the common fallacy of young people to
>  underestimate the value of experience.

We do value experience in the people who are hired to be staff
members. We as an organization have done a phenominal, almost
unthinkable, job in getting to where we are now. Through that, our
community members have amassed a large amount of experience of their
own, and it would be a bigger fallacy to disregard that. Board
elections to date have never been short on qualified candidates.

>  People with strong convictions and
>  beliefs and passions _and_ experience who would support our cause
>  wholeheartedly can be found -- and they can be asked to commit to core
>  principles and values we hammer out. To a large extent we've already
>  done so.

These people can be found from within our own community. Plus, the
people we have are likely better suited to our organizations values
then people from outside. There are, perhaps, some exceptions to this
rule.

>  The mixing of the senior managers, accountants, lawyers and the young
>  wiki volunteer enthusiasts into a single body is a recipe for conflict
>  and burn-out: One group has near limitless energy, the other has to be
>  conservative with its time; one group tries to make measured decisions
>  with long term implications, the other is highly involved in actions
>  taking effect immediately; one group tries to be vocal and visible as
>  members of a community, the other tries to be cautious and deliberate.

The argument here is that we need to either (a) keep our volunteers
(which, at the moment, is everybody) out of the vital decision making
processes, or (b) not introduce a group of tired old professionals
into it. I choose (a) every time. This is what we have done until now,
and we've had undeniable success with the method. Maybe our most
radical features are precisely the reasons why we have been so
successful and have not stagnated and rotted like many other
organizations do. I say that we need to forge our own path and set our
sights higher then other organizations ever have.

--Andrew Whitworth