[Wikimedia-l] Your support is wanted: The WMF Board of Trustees is looking for a new Board member

[James Alexander]

Snipping a bunch for simplicities sake

On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 11:14 PM, Jan-Bart de Vreede <
jdevreede at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> I simply don't agree.
> a) Chapters are part of the community
> b) Whenever a vote comes up for an appointed seat that seat obviously does
> not vote, therefore the (s)elected seats have a majority vote on any
> appointed seat (5 our of 9 votes) Apart from that I would say that Jimmy's
> seat is a community seat, but recognise that not all share that viewpoint.
>
> Jan-Bart
>

 :-/ To be honest I don't particularly like this meme that the chapter are
part of the community either. The chapters may be part of the community
(and so the statement not false) but we use the phrasing in such a way as
to say that they are more then they are.  There may be a part of the
community but they are really a very small part of it overall.

Their power in board selection and movement voice (both formally and
informally) is disproportionately huge and we set them up to represent the
community when that is a serious misstatement. They represent their members
who are a very small subset of the community and often have a very
different goal and interest set then the, much larger, remainder of the
community and depending on the chapter may include more donors or readers
then editors.

That is not to say they don't do good things at times (or that it is a
problem to include donors or readers, personally I think they are part of
our larger community) but we should not confuse what they actually are.

Jimmy is a whole different question ;) I would certainly say he deserves a
seat at the table, I prefer to just categorize him as "Jimmy" because he's
just a class of his own in all ways :).

James