Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
I am not qualified for the ArchCom, but I am familiar with several engineers working in government or running private wiki farms or their own businesses who I think would be qualified.
Another qualification I'd look for is substantial Wikimedia community involvement. Architecting requires a very thorough understanding of who you're building for. (I recently raised this same issue on the design mailing list related to editing Wikipedia... I think it's very difficult to build great tools for a community that you're not a part of.)
Thankfully, we have lots of good candidates who are both brilliant and understand Wikimedia (Domas, Magnus, and Platonides come to mind off-hand).
The trickier part of having non-employees on a committee like this is that other people won't be getting paid to participate and may not have as much time to commit as a result. It's still a bit unclear to me how much work is involved on a weekly basis. If it's just an hour-long IRC session, that's a lot different than needing ten hours or more every week.
MZMcBride