Well, since someone brought that up, I'd risk asking:
Does it make any sense to make the board in some of its future incarnations
more representative?
More representative of the editors?
More representative of the world's lands and languages?
More representative of the world's different economic regions?
More representative of some relevant professional fields that are relevant
for being in the Board of a massively-international-and-multilingual
transparent web-oriented education-oriented non-profit?
A thing that always bothered me strongly is that there were very little or
zero representation for these countries in the Board, ever: India, China,
Russia, Iran, Brazil, Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Arab
countries and finally, all of Africa. (I picked these countries by
population and roughly, the representation in the list of the world's top
spoken languages.)
I'll possibly be sorry for bringing this up, but there were no black people
on the board, ever.
Also, it bothers me somewhat that there were fewer women than men in the
board, if you count the whole history at all times. There were 29 board
members ever, and 9 of them were women. Not a huge gap, but a gap
nevertheless. (I'm very bad with numbers, please slap me if I'm not
counting correctly.) Women are 4 out of 9 in the current board, which is
nearly a half and maybe it's not a concern any longer, but I wonder whether
it's intentional or just a coincidence. I am not saying that it must be
intentionally a half, but it's a thing to consider.
Finally, why is the board's composition as it is now? I refer to the total
number of people on it, and the number of elected and appointed members,
and the quasi-permanent founder seat. I'm sorry if these things are obvious
to people who learned something about non-profit management; I did not, but
I care about this movement and I am curious, and possibly many other people
are curious as well. I can find the resolutions about expansion, but they
don't do much to explain the rationale behind the numbers.
PLEASE, PRETTY PLEASE, correct me if any of my facts are wrong.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2016-02-23 14:58 GMT+02:00 WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>om>:
Sydney and Risker make a good point that much of the
current board is
already fairly new and simply appointing a whole new board is unlikely to
be the solution we now need.
Whether any individual board members feel sufficiently responsible for
recent events that they should resign few but they can say. But the
movement is in a serious mess and it is their duty to ensure we get out of
it.
In the short term the current board vacancy is an opportunity for the
board. Reappointing Doc James would bring back a much respected board
member who already has several months recent WMF board experience. It would
also be a clear signal that the board wanted to start steering the movement
out of the current quagmire. Conversely, not reappointing Doc James risks
leaving the impression that this particular onion has a few more layers yet
to go.
In the medium term the board could reform it's constitution so that over
the next couple of years we move to an all elected board and a membership
system open to all who volunteer time to the project. There are some
discussions about this here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_membership_contro…
I appreciate there are a lot of threads running on the current kerfuffle,
but I think board reform is worth a new thread.
WereSpielChequers
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On 22 February 2016 at 22:00, Sydney Poore <sydney.poore(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 2:08 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> > I also hope that the current Board members will thoughtfully consider
> > whether it's in the best interests of the Wikimedia Foundation and
the
larger Wikimedia movement for them to continue as
Board members.
The instability that would result from large scale resignations of
Board members would be devastating to WMF.
That aside, under the best of circumstances, the volunteer BoT of WMF
are faced with an extremely demanding and challenging work load. And,
no volunteer board has the skill set to manage the problems that have
come up over the last few months and have escalated out of control.
I strongly encourage giving the BoT time to react to the most recent
comments, and develop a responsible plan of action.
I also agree with Sydney, and will point out that in the past year, we
have
had brand new board members in 3 board-selected
seats (one of whom only
participated for a few weeks), and 3 community seats (two of whom remain
in
place, the third being replaced by a former board
member. That is at
least
five new members in a single year, no matter how
one cuts it - and it
doesn't even take into consideration the ongoing process for
chapter-selected seats.
This past year has already seen the largest turnover in board membership
that the Foundation has ever experienced; it was unusual to have more
than
two seats change incumbents in all the past
years. We have already seen
very significant change in the make-up of the Board, and half the board
is
still learning the ropes and responsibilities.
This level of change is
likely to be at least partly responsible for some of the unfortunate
situations we have seen in the last several months. But those who are
seeking a new board...well, you already have one.
Risker/Anne
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