I've decided to take a different approach to the one I have been taking on the subject of our new expert board member. I'm going to make a constructive suggestion (perhaps I should have started with that approach...).
It is self-evident that the WMF board needs to make decisions about a wide range of subjects and that often those decisions will require some knowledge and experience of the subject in question. It is also self-evident that the community is not likely to select board members that, between them, have knowledge and experience of all the subjects required. This is why there are expert board members, to fill in the gaps. So, the need for experts is beyond question. I am, however, going to question the need for them to be on the board. The rest of the board do not, to my knowledge, abstain from voting when the subject for discussion is not one they are an expert on. This means the expert has just one vote of many, so that vote being based on expertise is largely irrelevant. The expertise is useful because the expert uses that expertise to advise the rest of the board, which means many votes become based on expertise. There are two main things a board member can do to shape the way the foundation works. They can speak up in discussions and they can cast their vote. I believe I have shown that the speaking up part is far more significant for an expert than the voting part. For that reason, I suggest that the vote be taken away from expert board members, they don't need it. Experts should sit on the advisory board where they can advise members of the community who sit on the board of trustees. This would allow more community involvement, but would also allow more expert involvement. At the moment we can only have four experts since we don't want experts to outnumber the community and having too many people on the board makes it inefficient. If the experts were moved to the advisory board, there would be no real limit to how many of them we could have. Those that have expertise relevant to whatever is on the agenda for a given board meeting could be invited to that board meeting, offer their advice, and then the community members could vote. This is the key thing - the members of the advisory board need to actually be used. At the moment I believe the advisory board is largely dormant. If the board of trustees consulted the relevant members of the advisory board more, there would be no need for experts to be on the board of trustees. To summarise, my suggestion is to abolish all the expert seats on the WMF board of trustees and replace them with community selected seats (either direct elections, chapter selections or some other method entirely). The advisory board would then be filled with experts on all the subjects required, which the board of trustees would then routinely consult. This would, of course, need to happen over time - the damage to continuity that would happen if that were done in one go right now wouldn't worth it. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l