On 1 February 2012 17:38, Stuart West <stuw...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Feb 1, 2012, at 2:17 PM, Risker wrote: > > > it gives the impression that the current three > > elected members of the board are somehow considered not representative of > > the movement.... It > > concerns me a lot that the 97% of active Wikimedians who are not chapter > > members seem to not be considered part of the movement. > > Anne, my personal view is that elections capture the input of a certain > subset of our community: those editors who are fairly active and who are > interested in governance issues. That subset of our editors is an > important part of our community. > > Having seats appointed by movement organizations like the chapters offers > a chance to involve of another subset of our community: those who are > interested enough in governance issues to get involved in the leadership / > decision-making of movement organizations. That's also an important subset > of our community. > > But, to your point, neither of these two subsets alone nor the combination > of the two fully represents our movement. Many groups are excluded. For > example, the "silent majority" of 75,000+ active editors who haven't > historically voted in elections. Or our 475 million readers. etc., etc., > etc. > > Governance and suffrage in an online community is really, really hard. I > don't think we have the perfect system. Our current board structure was > put in place less than 4 years ago. The one thing I know is that it will > change as we try new things to make it better. I want us to continue > improving it. And I for one am open to absolutely any suggestion for how > we can do that. > > I do agree that governance and suffrage is hard; however, it shouldn't intentionally be designed to give a disproportionate representation (and essentially double suffrage) to one subset of the community over another. Chapter members have the opportunity to influence five seats on the Board; those who are unable (for many variations of "unable") to be chapter members are only able to influence three seats.
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