[Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees

[Stuart West]

On Feb 1, 2012, at 2:17 PM, Risker wrote:

> it gives the impression that the current three
> elected members of the board are somehow considered not representative of
> the movement....  It
> concerns me a lot that the 97% of active Wikimedians who are not chapter
> members seem to not be considered part of the movement.

Anne, my personal view is that elections capture the input of a certain subset of our community:  those editors who are fairly active and who are interested in governance issues.  That subset of our editors is an important part of our community.

Having seats appointed by movement organizations like the chapters offers a chance to involve of another subset of our community:  those who are interested enough in governance issues to get involved in the leadership / decision-making of movement organizations. That's also an important subset of our community.

But, to your point, neither of these two subsets alone nor the combination of the two fully represents our movement.  Many groups are excluded.  For example, the "silent majority" of 75,000+ active editors who haven't historically voted in elections. Or our 475 million readers. etc., etc., etc.

Governance and suffrage in an online community is really, really hard.  I don't think we have the perfect system.  Our current board structure was put in place less than 4 years ago.  The one thing I know is that it will change as we try new things to make it better.  I want us to continue improving it.  And I for one am open to absolutely any suggestion for how we can do that.

-s