While my first impression of this proposed plan is fairly positive, I do have one major
concern.
Wiadomość napisana przez Ramzy Muliawan
<ramzymuliawan14(a)gmail.com> w dniu 24.02.2016, o godz. 11:47:
- Six regional seats, popularly elected by the regional communities. The
proposed "regional communities" would be North America, South and Central
America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and
Asia Pacific and Oceania.
- Five at-large seats, or what we call today as community seats. Like the
regional one, it will be popularly elected --- but by the whole community.
My concern with the "at-large" seats is that if we’ve looked at the history of
community Board elections, the electorate is overwhelmingly from the developed world. The
candidates are also overwhelmingly from the developed world. We’ve already seen this in
the current election, where despite the presence of six fine developing world candidates,
myself included, the electorate settled on three white men (no offense to Dariusz, Denny
and James).
Under this proposed plan, Europe and North America will get one seat each. Let’s
hypothesize that all the elected "at-large" seats went to developed world
candidates. And then the affiliate seats have also traditionally gone to developed
countries as well. Then we have Jimmy’s seat. Under this plan, we run the risk of having
eleven of the fifteen seats dominated by developed countries. So does this mean that the
remaining four seats should simply be tokens for developing countries, but to which we
have no leverage because we can easily be outvoted by the other members of the Board?
Last year, I had spoken out against quotas for developing countries, since it effectively
puts our representation at the mercy of the Board. I am still figuring out what would be
the best way to approach this issue, especially since voting for community Board seats is
by language, not by country, but I’m looking at a mixture of temporary quotas (and I
stress "temporary"), developing stronger mechanisms for getting developing
country Wikipedians involved in movement governance (through affiliates, stronger
consultation mechanisms when discussing movement-wide issues, etc.), and weighted voting
in favor of certain geographies if this is technologically possible.
Josh
JAMES JOSHUA G. LIM
Bachelor of Arts in Political Science
Class of 2013, Ateneo de Manila University
Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines
jamesjoshualim(a)yahoo.com <mailto:jamesjoshualim@yahoo.com> | +63 (977) 831-7582
Facebook/Twitter: akiestar | Wikimedia: Sky Harbor
http://about.me/josh.lim <http://about.me/josh.lim>