[Foundation-l] A proposal for organisation

[Birgitte SB]

--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> Congrats to all those who made up so far.
> I summarize.
> 
> 
> An organisation with
> * a board
> * members (ASF members)
> * aside committees (event, public relations etc...)
> 
> ASF Members elect the board.
> 
> A collection of projects, whose participants elect
> ASF members.
> 
> Each project has a governing committee in charge, on
> which there are at 
> leasts 2 ASF members, and which report to the board
> of the ASF.
> 
> Comments ?
> 
> Ant
> 
> 
> 
>


Personally,  I  really like this model a great deal. 
I like it much better as it is here than with any of
the modifications which have already been proposed. 
This really could work easily without major elections
in most cases.  I think we should keep it as simple as
possible.  Start off with all current buearucrats
being Project Members ask them to immediately nominate
one(?) other person from where they are a bueruecrat
and two(?) people from a language too small to have a
buerucrat.  That is the seed membership which should
allow initial elections of officers and voting on
basic bylaws etc.  From then on any Project Member can
nominate anyone to join as in Apache, also future
buearucrats do not automatically become members.  Once
that is setup we begin to worry about how to seed the
Foundation Memebership.  I think that Foundation
Membership should be drawn from Project Members and
Chapter Members pretty much exclusively without
"making a choice" of which membership card one person
can carry.  Although I do not think *officers* at the
Project Level should hold any position on Foundation
Level commitees at the same time, I do not see a
problem with an officer being simple voting Foundation
Member.  Nor do I see a problem with Foundation
Committee members being simple voting Project or
Chapter Members.  I imagine the Foundation Membership
would be pretty self-balancing.  If for example the
Foundation Membership begins to be over weighted with
Wikipedia Project Members the Chapter Members and
other Non-pedia Project Members could easily put a
stop to more Wikipedia Projects Members being
confirmed and confirm people from other areas to
restore balance.  

As to concerns that smaller languages will be left
out, and that they have different issues.  I think the
first can be easily avoided as so many people strongly
believe in promoting smaller languages.  Honestly can
they be more left out in this new system than they are
now?  That they face different challenges according to
size is even more reason to keep them together so they
can learn from each other.  A place were RC can be
checked by hand will one day grow, and to learn in
advance how to deal with libel on a larger project can
only be a benifit.  The problems faced at a smaller
languages can find many suggestions from those who
have already "been there and done that".  But I think
the Project Membership (especially non-pedia ones)
will be as concerned with common technical issues as
legal or procedural ones.  Besides that there are many
issues that *do* scale.  How to encourage people to
work on core topics, instead of pet projects for
example.  There could always be a backdoor built in to
allow the Board to appoint people from
un-representented languages to Project Membership if a
complaint comes up through the Chapters.  But I do not
think it would come to that. 

Birgitte SB

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