[Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Stephanie Daugherty]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 5:48 PM, masti <mastigm at gmail.com> wrote:

> why should tht be decided on foundation level? Do you think communities
> are so broken that they cannot make their own decisions?
> This would be the only reason to start discussing enforcement of such
> major changes
>


I personally am not convinced here that we at at the point yet where we have
this level of community brokenness, but we are getting very close if we
aren't there already. The consensus process used at the individual project
level oftentimes breaks down entirely on very contentious issues with as
little as a dozen participants in a discussion. Governance by consensus is
an important part of our heritage and future, but as currently implemented,
it holds us a prisoner of our own inertia in some key areas.

This is a major threat to the future of several large WMF projects, and one
that has been getting some media attention, particularly by naysayers. I
honestly don't think these issues alone can cause us to fail, but I do
believe that if ignored long enough, they will create a set of conditions
that will allow it to happen. Once conditions become intolerable to the most
dedicated members of a community, the possibility of a "mainstream" fork - a
fork that takes the bulk of the community with it - begins to become a
viable prospect.

The fallout, obviously, would be enormous. There are a few readily apparent
ways that I see that we can reach such a point.

   - The projects become ungovernable, and the resulting chaos results in a
   political (in a wikipolitics sense) fork in order to establish a more viable
   structure. (Likely, and to some degree in motion already)
   - The foundation itself goes rogue, and tries to impose conditions
   unacceptable to it's member communities. (Unlikely, but not inconceivable.)
   - The foundation proves too unresponsive for the technical needs of the
   communities it serves. (Likely, already happening to some degree.)
   - The foundation becomes insolvent. (Possible at some point if
   fundraising efforts fail.)


Our communities and the foundation itself need to look at these as serious
"threats from within" to our mission, and decide accordingly how we will
deal with them. If we ignore them, and keep our head in the sand, one or
more of them may eventually happen, and the outcome won't be pretty.

-Steph