[Foundation-l] "Expertise" board seats: the NomCom invites your feedback

[Michael Bimmler]

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
> (Note, I said approvals and development. The lack of involvement by
> ChapCom in the active development of chapters is even more concerning
> than the lack of transparency in the approvals process.)
>

And surely, because you're involved with every chapter and/or on the
ChapCom mailinglist, you are able to make that judgment. (Yes, You
have been involved with DC. That's a special case, see below).


> Well for one thing, when I first started questioning the idea of why
> there were no US chapters either nationally or subnationally (this was
> before the Pennsylvania chapter started) i was told that it simply
> wasn't going to happen, that the Chapters Committee could not decide
> what they wanted to do, and that in fact there was direct opposition
> on the committee towards certain countries or regions forming chapters.
>

This is untrue. The issue of sub-national chapters has been discussed
for a long time intra-ChapCom (because it is not a light issue which
can be decided about in a couple days, sorry). We have also solicited
board input for quite some time, but the board was for a long time not
really willing to make principal decisions on this matter. This has
now changed and a general framework has, for the first time, been
developed. which is good and which also means that we can now really
work on the approval of sub-national chapters.

> Currently there are only 18 chapters (excluding UK). There should be
> far more, and I seriously suspect the Chapters Committee is the problem.
>

How so? Could it not also be that the Chapter groups themselves are
somewhat less than active? Back when we founded WmCH, yes, I
considered ChapCom to be a "barrier" too and a slowly rising one,
alas. But now that I believe to know both sides, I think that ChapCom
has become much faster and more organised, not least also due to the
great work by our new communications advisor (and general reminder
person) Peter / privatemusings.

> WM Venezuela still drafting bylaws since November 2006

Well, yes. With all due respect, what do you expect us to do? We can't
draft bylaws *for the chapters*, for this, we'd need to know all the
legislations of the world, which we don't. We can only afterwards look
at the scope/aim/goal part of the bylaws but they really have to
figure all the practical proceduralities themselves.

> WM Canada has been "finishing up by-laws" since March.

Yes. I happen to be on the wikimedia-canada list and, from what I see
there, not all too much is going on. See, there is a limited amount of
things Chapcom can do: We're always happy to help with advice, and
yes, we might need to get more proactive, but we can't "replace a
community". Either people are there and willing to do this or they
aren0t.

> WM Hrvatske (Croatia I assume? The page says something about Zagreb)
> has been translating bylaws since December last year.

We can't help much here, not speaking Croatian. If they have serious
problems, I believe the WMF would consider a request for the funding
of professional translations.

> WM India still in bylaws discussion since November of last year.
as above.

> WM Norge listed as awaiting approval since July.

The ChapCom has already been voting on this, but the vote had been
stalled, as somehow, our new membership resolution had not been
considered by the board and therefore, we suspended voting until
knowing who was actually entitled to vote and who not. This has now
been cleared, we expect that the board can vote on Norge at its next
meeting.

> WM Portugal listed as "bylaws ready, discussing how to constitute"
> since March.

This strikes me as odd, similarly to Thomas. But we're glad to provide
help if approached, but in many cases, we don't even have email
address etc. from people so it's much easier for us, if they write a
mail to *our non-filtered mailinglist* chapterscommittee-l at
wikimedia punto org

> WM NYC still figuring things out since Jan. 07,
> WM Penn. still listed as figuring stuff out since June 07.
> WM DC has not heard a peep from the chapters committee since May.
>

as explained above - sub-national chapters had been not individually
considered until the general framework was set. We now have this and
there is also a sub-national chapters working group, so I expect this
to be dealt with speedily.

> Nine chapters languishing in development for an unacceptable length of
> time. This is not to say that the chapters themselves hold no
> responsibility, but I've seen no evidence of the Chapters Committee
> proactively reaching out to say "What can we do to help you guys get
> moving". I suspect if they did, we'd have quite a few more chapters.
>

I'm not sure whether this is really the major issue here. We can't
guide every chapter in a step-by-step procedure "Now you do this, now
you do that, now you do that". On the one hand, there are too many
local specialities, which rather require input from lawyers or
law-savvy people from these jurisdictions (ahem, Wikimedia UK, I
wouldn't know how ChapCom could have helped much there, we know zero
about UK Company Law...), on the other hand, it *must* be possible. I
have seen many chapters form without any "real-time guidance" by
ChapCom (in fact, I co-established one in that manner) and it *does*
work. It needs an active community, a few people who really want to
invest time in doing tedious things like writing bylaws and
translating them, it requires local meetups etc. etc. But, as much as
we enjoy giving advice, we cannot be "facilitators" for every local
group, I can't write bylaws for WM Venezuela and I can't organise a
pub-wikimeet for Wikimedia Canada (random examples, no offence).

> A couple of Wikimeetups ago, I discussed with some people what their
> interests in developing a chapter were. Quite a few people expressed
> no interest, either because they believed the Chapters Committee was
> unable or unwilling to help, or because they simply believed that it
> was impossible for them to get a chapter approved and they didn't want
> to waste the effort.

Well, maybe you should have a look at how many chapters were approved
in the last 9 months. Quite a few, I daresay. And this, although
ChapCom takes its role seriously and actually considers all bylaws in
depth before submitting an official recognition to the board.


> The fact that people even think that sort of
> thing speaks for itself that the Chapters Committee has failed on some
> level.

On a PR level, possibly. That's why I am very glad that we have
privatemusings with us now.

>
> The Local Chapter FAQ has a "Do not translate until ChapCom has had an
> opportunity to update it" message since Feb. 2006.
>

Ouch. I'm sure many people have noted this now and we'll have a look at this.

> The Chapter Creation Guide has not been updated in over a year.
> In over two years of existence, the line that says "The details of
> this process are given in the [[Chapter approval process]] document."
> are STILL a red link. So prospective chapters have ZERO idea of what
> the approval process is.
>

Why, that's not good, I agree. But it can't be that bad, because we
still do get mails which simply say "Dear ChapCom, this <permalink>
are the English translations of our bylaws, please review and comment
and then approve, if you may". And this is exactly how it should be
done. If you want to, you can write two sentences to that effect on
meta to make it a bluelink. Else, we'll see that we can do it as soon
as someone finds time. But it's a wiki.


> These are just some of the criticisms of the chapters process.
>

I tried to address them as detailedly as possibly (although we might
want to make a new thread for further discussion of it), hope this
helps.

Michael



-- 
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler at gmail.com