[Wikimedia-l] Are chapters part of the community and board seats for affiliates?

[Benjamin Lees]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 12:42 PM, cyrano <cyrano.fawkes at gmail.com> wrote:

> Why not distinguish the community seats from the Chapters seats with the
> terms "community seats" and " Chapters seats"?
> Using the word community in both cases may induce to believe that's it's
> the same community with two branches. But nothing guarantees that unity.
>

They are differentiated in the bylaws: you have "Community-selected
Trustees" and "Chapter-selected Trustees".  Indeed, the bylaw changes in
2008 make it clear that the chapter-selected seats are not regarded as
being selected by the community.[0]


On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 6:14 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> Here we are, this is one of the things I wanted to point out (maybe one by
> one it's easier): a "chapter" is not a person, of course it's not a
> "community member"... but (IMHO) *of course* chapter members are Wikimedia
> community members.
> Logical consequence: the "chapter" meant as "set of the chapter members"
> is a subset of the community and hence a "part of the community".
>

Most of the people on the WMF board (well, all of them, at the moment) are
community members too. :-)


[0]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Bylaws&diff=28280&oldid=28279Note
that "
The majority of the Board shall be elected or appointed from within the
community." was changed to "A majority of the Board Trustee positions,
other than the Community Founder Trustee position, shall be selected or
appointed from the community and the chapters."