[Foundation-l] Opinions/suggestions for "outside" members of the board?

[Erik Moeller]

On 6/19/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> Larry Lessig - head of Creative Commons
> Mitch Kapor - head of Mozilla Foundation (Firefox), founder of EFF, and
> extremely passionate about the Wikipedia mission (and he edits
> Wikipedia, and he is absolutely fascinated by and supportive of our
> community model)
> Richard Stallman - needs no introduction
> Eben Moglen - main legal mastermind of the FSF

These are the obvious American free culture / free software
representatives. As I've said before, we need to think carefully about
what we are trying to achieve. If this is for the purpose of
fundraising and expression of mutual respect (I know you are on the CC
board already), then an Advisory Council would do just fine, and would
allow us to put an arbitrary number of people there.

Would I want Eben Moglen, RMS or Larry Lessig to vote on our copyright
policies, or on what new project to approve, or on what personnel to
hire? Most likely not. Would I want Mitch Kapor, a key advocate of
Mozilla's current corporate approach, to vote on whether Wikipedia
should allow advertising? Definitely not. Nor do these people bring
truly different perspectives to our organization that we do not
already have. In other words, we do not have to search much in our
community to find people who think exactly like RMS. Yes, they are
crucially important in the movements they represent. But we are
already well known and well established in that scene.

Please review the typical descriptions of non-profit Board
responsibilities, e.g.:
http://www.idealist.org/if/idealist/en/FAQ/QuestionViewer/default?section=03&item=02

Note that I believe Wikimedia is substantially _different_ from
typical non-profits, so any standard recipes do not apply. However,
the responsiblities of the Board are fairly clear, and in our context,
the Board -- even with a decreased role in day to day governance --
has a very substantive role in defining the future of our project.
Deciding to literally give a share of that future to an outsider is a
very serious move. Much more serious than, say, removing an inactive
trustee from the Board.

If you go down the route of appointing a substantial number of
outsiders, at the very least you should consider delegating a subset
of that authority and responsiblity to an Executive Committee. But I
don't see a strong reason to do this in the first place, and none has
been put forward. What are the reasons we need RMS, Lessig, or Moglen
on our regular governing Board?

Again, if you want fresh thinking on the governing Board, and people
who actually participate, then I think we need to look in the worlds
of
- access to knowledge in the developing world
- eLearning and ICT skills development
- academia and education
- languages, internationalization, localization
- freedom of speech (think Chinese Wikipedia)
- digitization, archiving and metadata
- ...

These are areas which are not truly represented in our current group,
nor can we easily find experts here in our community. They are,
however, critical to the success of our organization. Again, I am not
convinced we need these people on the governing Board, but I'd prefer
someone who _doesn't_ have a strong, preformed opinion on many of the
copyright and policy questions that will come up.

A group of only Americans would be regrettable. If you, in spite of my
objections above, want people from the free software / free culture
community, you might consider people like [[Georg Greve]] (FSF
Europe), [[Volker Grassmuck]] (Wizards of OS organizer, has written an
excellent book about free software / free culture), Markus Beckedahl
(Netzwerk Neue Medien, very involved with Creative Commons), [[Konrad
Becker]], someone from FFII.org, someone from CCC e.V., ... there are
lots of possibilities. Jean-Baptiste should be able to come up with a
few other good Euroepean suggestions, but I'd also like people from
the developing world in particular.

Erik