[Foundation-l] Design goals for the election and board selection process

[Delirium]

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 4. Responsiveness - that the board listens to the community
>
> 5. Independence - that the board has the moral authority to make  
> unpopular decisions at times, so that the board does not end up being  
> too beholden to internal politics of the moment and can feel the  
> strength to stick to principles even in cases where those principles  
> might not be so popular
>
> (Yes, 4 and 5 are in tension and therefore have to be balanced.)
>   

These relate, I think, to the question of what exactly the community 
*is*.  The core group of the community are probably people who: 1) are 
committed to Wikimedia's core goals (though they may disagree on some 
matters); and 2) spend significant time and effort working towards those 
goals.  But that's a pretty abstract definition, and you can't make 
voting eligibility based on that too easily.  Our current approximation 
is "people who've edited a Wikimedia project at least a little bit", but 
that isn't really the same thing.  As our projects get more and more 
popular, an increasing percentage of the total internet population will 
be eligible to vote under current rules, and "anyone who's ever edited 
Wikipedia" will start to look less and less like any sort of community.  
It'd also make us susceptible to outside advertising campaigns, as 
someone wanting to influence the Foundation would just need to rally 
some otherwise inactive account-holders to rediscover their accounts and 
vote.

Some of this can be tackled using human judgment by the Foundation being 
"responsive" in ways other than through voting. If the Board members are 
themselves longstanding Wikimedians, then presumably they have some idea 
of what the community is and how to listen to it, and so can keep an eye 
on what it thinks without solving all the tricky problems of voting and 
voter eligibility.

That doesn't really solve the question of how to get people on the board 
in the first place, of course, which I'll pass on for now.

-Mark