I think this topic has been overblown. It's not as if anyone on this
mailing list has any right or opportunity to pressure a chapter to remove a
member of their Board - unless those individuals are members of the
specific chapter. And really, if you're an active member of that chapter,
you should already be aware of the people who are on the Board, and their
general attitudes toward the community - and their definition of what they
consider to be the "community" they're representing or interacting with.
It's important to remember that there's a huge range in the extent and
nature of relationships between chapters and the editorial communities to
which they are most closely attached. In some cases, the chapters are made
up almost entirely of active community members from a specific project; in
other cases, membership and voting rights in a chapter are linked to
donations or are wide open to anyone who wants to be a member, whether or
not they are active participants in any WMF project. Even when chapters
actively support editing community initiatives, those initiatives have to
fit within the broader umbrella of the project as a whole. There are half
a dozen chapters whose members are most closely affiliated with English
Wikipedia, for example, so their ability to affect the broader community is
small.
There are examples on Meta of chapter trustees who do focus on the
separation between the chapters and the editing communities, and describe
where they see the two interfacing; those are public statements made by
individuals, and it's reasonable to respond to those. I'm not seeing a lot
of benefit in getting out the pitchforks and torches to go after a single
individual for an uncontextualized comment attributed to them.
Risker/Anne