Denny, thanks for supporting this issue moving on. Before few remarks I would respond inline, I want to say that the *draft* of the idea to make community assembly have been published by Pharos:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_Council_Compact I want to give a small background of our work on the proposal: Richard approached me immediately after I sent the first email from this thread, so we started to work on it. It turned out that we had very different perspectives of what should be done. However, we worked on creating a synthetic proposal, which would cover both sets of ideas. I wanted to make a joke-spoiler, but I want to restrain of it because I want to see if the differences between our approaches are actually the differences between different cultural/continental background. Besides two of us, Lodewijk and Lane contributed, mostly with comments. It turned out that Lodewijk was on the line I started my idea in discussion with Richard, while Lane was on the line started by Richard. Both of them found unacceptable the opposite part. If so, I'd like to ask everybody to try to understand that our future assembly should be generally acceptable to everybody, no matter of cultural differences; which means that we should have to reach consensus in such issues, not limited on Richard's and my approaches in particular. Besides that, it's just a draft of the proposal and everything could be changed as long as we reach consensus about one final proposal. I am fine with it as long as Wikimedians get a framework to communicate and make decisions which matter to themselves. On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 1:26 AM, Denny Vrandecic <dvrande...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > You write that Board members tend to think of themselves as the governing > body. At least for myself, I can say that this is not the case. My > understanding restricts the Board only to the role of being the Board of > the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation is not the community. The Board is > not the voice of the community for the Foundation. The community is neither > lead by the Foundation, nor by the Board. I don't even think there is a > community - there are numerous overlapping communities. This is misunderstandings, unless you want to say you don't see Board as the governing body of Wikimedia Foundation :P > It seems to me that in open collaborative projects like ours, the amount of > scrutiny and criticism a governance body receives is negatively correlated > to the amount of competences it has. Creating or deleting content, banning > disruptive users from a project, deciding how the energy of the community > should be spent on creating content? None of these is the business of the > Board. None of these is the competence of the Board. And that’s good. This part is very important! There are no "open collaborative projects like ours". You are not a Board of Reddit with admins controlling content. Our social structure and civilization implications are far beyond any of those projects. That's why WMF members -- as long as there is no community-wide body -- have to have vision, wisdom and balls. The basis of the most of my criticism of the Board lays in the fact that it collectively have never shown all three virtues at once. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
