[Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

[Delirium]

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>valdelli at bluemail.ch wrote:
>  
>
>>The community could accept only representative members voted with normal
>>procedure. 
>>    
>>
>
>Of course.
>
>But community vote is not the only way to get board members.  We have
>some very good board candidates who are not famous in the community and
>who could bring to the table professional expertise that we greatly
>need, but who would not put themselves through the troll wars of an
>election.
>  
>
This sounds reasonable, although I think they're not entirely different 
things, if we're speaking in an informal sense (which is really what 
will dominate community-board relations more than the formal setup 
will).  It's possible, for example, that there are people who would 
actually prevail in an election, but are deterred from running because 
of the election process.  If they were appointed, those people could be 
said in some tea-leaf-reading sense to actually represent the 
community.  Then there are gradations---people who wouldn't actually win 
an election, but who are generally respected and don't engender much 
objection; then unknown people; and finally people who are actively 
disliked by a large segment of the community.

We could try some variation on some of the consensus-style methods we 
tend to use on the encyclopedia.  For example, solicit nominations, 
possibly in private, and then privately contact the people nominated to 
ask if they'd accept a position if chosen.  Then make a (public) list of 
potential candidates, and solicit feedback on them, possibly 
privately-expressed feedback so people don't have to publicly attack 
anyone.  Then appoint the people who have reasonably good consensus 
support.  Assuming the feedback is indeed expressed in private, and the 
list is more than a handful of people, those not selected shouldn't 
really be negatively impacted (not being selected for 2 slots out of a 
list of, say, 15 isn't particularly bad).

This is a little trickier than the way we do it on articles, because to 
avoid public flamewars and driving people off, much of it would have to 
be done in private communications, and therefore the decision of what 
constitutes consensus would have to be made by whoever reads those 
emails.  It could be the current board, or someone they designate.  
Technically/formally, that would essentially be the board appointing new 
members itself, but if you five agree to follow some rough community 
consensus in making those appointments, I'm pretty sure you're not going 
to actually lie to us and claim someone had consensus support when they 
didn't, even if we have no way of verifying that.

Anyway that's a pretty off-the-top-of-my-head outline of how to design a 
system that merges community consensus and sensitivity towards potential 
members who aren't politicians, so I'm sure there are better ways of 
doing it.  I do think some sort of balancing of those goals is 
necessary, though.

-Mark