[Foundation-l] Board-announcement: Board Restructuring

[Tim Landscheidt]

Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:

>>  Or, in other words: There is no
>>  power because you cannot give orders to volunteers.

> This meme is oft-repeated but still untrue.  Almost every volunteer
> organization has a hierarchy and "gives orders" to its members to some
> extent.  Its members are, of course, free to ignore those "orders",
> but the organization is then free to disallow them from further
> participation.

> Seriously, what volunteer organization can you think of where
> volunteers are told to just do whatever they feel like?  Does the
> Obama campaign committee give volunteers a bunch of blank signs and
> say "go support Obama", or do they assign people to particular routes
> and ask them to follow particular rules while canvassing?

> The Wikimedia Foundation may run this way, and maybe it's even a good
> way of running things, but it's certainly not impossible to do it any
> other way.

I have spent about a decade working in election campaigns,
and, to repeat the "meme": You cannot give orders to volun-
teers. (Besides, I see no rationale in disallowing an editor
to edit article A before he has edited article B - probably
you end up with no article edited at all. What would be the
benefit?)

  The US presidential election is a prime example: Polls
show that supporters of the Democratic Party will not only
cease their commitment if their favorite candidate is not
nominated, they will even vote for *another* party's candi-
date.

  That is exactly the point I made in the post you replied
to: Should the board decide against the consensus of the
volunteers (editors, developers, system administrators,
whatever), they will walk.

Tim