[Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

> I think it makes sense to get board members selected by the community 
> and board members selected by chapters because the focus is different. 
> I'd love to see members selected by the community being active editors, 
> involved on a regular basis on the project with editorial and soft 
> development activities. And I also love seeing board members selected by

> the chapters being more involved with the organizational side of things 
> (finances, legal, partnership and so on). Both sides are necessary.
> 
> Chapters are not so good to identify good representants of the editorial

> community. And the community is not so good at selecting board members 
> with specific expertise and knowledge on the organizational side of 
> things. Both selections complement each other greatly.
> 

Not that I disagree, but I think this invites us to think what actual role
the chapters have. Indeed, my impression (which might be wrong since I have
never performed any statistical analysis) is that the majority of the
chapter board members (and, for this purpose, the majority of participants
of this mailing list) are somewhat disentangled from the editing process -
at least often I check their contribution on their home page I find a
laughable amount of edits in the article namespace, for instance, a
two-digit amount per year. (I know there are exceptions). I remember some
time ago it was a discussion of the threshold for voters at the community
Board elections with the main idea that it is sometimes difficult to people
included in governance to have 50 edits in half a year, even if the edits
made after the announcement are accepted. I understand that many chapter
boards members are just busy with other things, I know they are often
administrators and have a lot of contributions in the Wikipedia namespace
for instance, I understand that the task of chapter boards is not writing
articles, and I do not want to accuse anybody - but still, is this exactly
what we had in mind when chapters were created? 

Cheers
Yaroslav