The explanatory notes that accompanied the original Articles of Association proclaimed that "our charity will be member-led and we want the norm to be that directors are elected by the members"
A "member-led" organisation - imagine that? In simple terms, an organisation that trusts the 5,000-strong UK Wikimedia community more than a handful of people who currently sit on the board.
My goodness how far away has the chapter gone from those original values.
First step down the slippery slope was the move towards two-year terms. Now we have these bonkers changes drempt up by a consultancy who took no consideration whatsoever of our particular values and want to model ourselves on other board-led charities. Guess what, we know how other charities are run and make a conscious decision at the start to do something different. After all, no other encyclopedias are written by non-specialists. Wikipedia was the first major website to give its entire content away under a free license. No other major website is run by a charity. Of course we're different. That's the bloody point.
For goodness sake, they even want to change the articles to get some complex provision in there that means there would never be a majority of directors up for election in a single year - because god forbid that the community would actually wanting to kick out a poorly-performing board en mass. God forbid the board should be subject to any accountability for their performance.
All I can say is thank goodness we don't have a board that is poorly performing, divided, poorly led, losing control of the direction of the charity, losing their major source of income or anything like that.
Because who knows what would happen then?
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Chris Keating
<chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Obviously it will be for the membership to decide whether to accept or reject these particular recommendations but it would be great if you could review the draft amendments at this stage.
Please do read, consider and comment, here:
PS. Just to clarify, these are resolutions as drafted by our lawyers: they have not yet been reviewed by the Board - obviously it remains important that we draft things in public where we can!
Chris
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