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

[Jean-Denis Vauguet]

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> To continue the ongoing board development conversation....
> 
> The board is considering adding some prominent person from outside the
> core Wikipedia community to the board and seeks brainstorming ideas of
> what type of person could be good, as well as mentions of names who we
> might want to approach.

Sorry if the issue I'll talk about has already been raised (if so, I 
missed it), but the real matter for me is not "who", but "for what". I 
mean, before itemizing people and draft the Ideal Wiki Board, one should 
think about the role of the appointed members.

IMO, it would be *great* to enjoy new ideas from people standing outside 
the Wikimedia bubble, since it certainly brings fresh air in our daily 
reflexion. But, I'm not going a bundle on a board which would have a 
majority of appointed members, especially if the appointed members were 
to be able to vote (ie. define the Foundation policy). I'm not 
underlying any "lack of confidence" in external point of views, by the 
way; but if we do look for people with different, fresh ideas, it is 
first and foremost to extract from those ideas some elements we, the 
meta community, would consider appropriate to our projects. The "meta 
community" here is its representants on the board, at least in the 
current structure.

For example, I'm not convinced that a business man, who could advocate 
for adding advertising in Wikipedia to streamline projects organization, 
would 1) get a positive feedback from the projects users 2) would be 
harmless to the projects, if he were able to vote for this proposal.

Several commitees have been launched this year. It's a great, great 
improvement, because it's a way for Wikimedia to have its member *and 
some external folks* working on concrete parts of the projects. Thus, I 
think it would be rather logical to have the Big Names (from Lessing to 
Moglen, to list some of your email) acting as first-class *adviser*, not 
as Wikimedia *leaders*.

If you (the current board, I guess) were to go the other way, ie. 
appointed members as leaders, a re-think of the community role should be 
done IMO. Some talked about a WikiCouncil somme weeks ago, a place were 
the community could discuss and make formal proposals/claims.

I do know the community is seperated from the foundation, but it would 
be a disaster if the community were to feel the foundation has betrayed 
projects users, wouldn't it?

> 
> 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
> 
> Comments on these names are welcome... as are further ideas of course!