[Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion

[Thomas Dalton]

I've decided to take a different approach to the one I have been
taking on the subject of our new expert board member. I'm going to
make a constructive suggestion (perhaps I should have started with
that approach...).

It is self-evident that the WMF board needs to make decisions about a
wide range of subjects and that often those decisions will require
some knowledge and experience of the subject in question. It is also
self-evident that the community is not likely to select board members
that, between them, have knowledge and experience of all the subjects
required. This is why there are expert board members, to fill in the
gaps.

So, the need for experts is beyond question. I am, however, going to
question the need for them to be on the board. The rest of the board
do not, to my knowledge, abstain from voting when the subject for
discussion is not one they are an expert on. This means the expert has
just one vote of many, so that vote being based on expertise is
largely irrelevant. The expertise is useful because the expert uses
that expertise to advise the rest of the board, which means many votes
become based on expertise.

There are two main things a board member can do to shape the way the
foundation works. They can speak up in discussions and they can cast
their vote. I believe I have shown that the speaking up part is far
more significant for an expert than the voting part. For that reason,
I suggest that the vote be taken away from expert board members, they
don't need it. Experts should sit on the advisory board where they can
advise members of the community who sit on the board of trustees.

This would allow more community involvement, but would also allow more
expert involvement. At the moment we can only have four experts since
we don't want experts to outnumber the community and having too many
people on the board makes it inefficient. If the experts were moved to
the advisory board, there would be no real limit to how many of them
we could have. Those that have expertise relevant to whatever is on
the agenda for a given board meeting could be invited to that board
meeting, offer their advice, and then the community members could
vote. This is the key thing - the members of the advisory board need
to actually be used. At the moment I believe the advisory board is
largely dormant. If the board of trustees consulted the relevant
members of the advisory board more, there would be no need for experts
to be on the board of trustees.

To summarise, my suggestion is to abolish all the expert seats on the
WMF board of trustees and replace them with community selected seats
(either direct elections, chapter selections or some other method
entirely). The advisory board would then be filled with experts on all
the subjects required, which the board of trustees would then
routinely consult. This would, of course, need to happen over time -
the damage to continuity that would happen if that were done in one go
right now wouldn't worth it.