[Foundation-l] Re: Bounties and expenses

Wed Jun 23 21:03:16 UTC 2004

bcorr at neaction.org wrote:

>I've been watching this conversation with great dismay. As someone else has 
>said, IMO Mark clearly has a very different vision of the Wikimedia board, and 
>an incredibly negative opinion of boards in general.
>  
>
It's quite possible that the majority of Wikimedians have a different 
view from me of what the board ought to be, but this was never really 
consulted in forming the board.  The board was *not* formed because we 
thought it would be a good idea to have a board to govern the project; 
it was formed because as a matter of the law on non-profits of the State 
of Florida, we are required to have a board.  Therefore, we do.  
However, that in itself is simply a legal formality.  If we are to hand 
over to the board significant powers, not only in the technical sense 
that legally they have powers, but in the moral sense that we are giving 
them a particular role in running the project, then that ought to be 
done explicitly.

My viewpoint, of course, is that we ought to do as much of our 
decision-making as possible in the wiki way.  There are many different 
viewpoints on how this is best done, and many can be read in depth, with 
arguments for and against various approaches, at the meatball wiki 
(http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki).  I have my 
particular views on what sorts of processes I think work best, but of 
course many others are possible, and I haven't insisted we pick any 
particular ones.  However, "elect a board of trustees to make decisions 
for the users" is not one of the wiki-style organizational methods I've 
run across, though I may have missed it.

Take, for example, the issue of dues.  One way to decide it is to have 
the board debate amongst themselves (either online or in person), 
solicit input from users, and then make a decision on what level to set 
the dues at.  Another possibility is to have a wiki-style discussion it, 
possibly on meta (I'm willing to use meta over mailing lists if that's 
the preference of most other people).  If a consensus emerges, then we 
set the dues at the consensus amount.  If there are strong 
disagreements, then we can identify a few of the leading choices and 
hold a vote.  Given that we already have voting software that has been 
used successfully, this is fairly easy to do.

I don't see any particular reason to favor the top-down decision-making 
process, especially given how alien it is to the way we (not to mention 
just about all others wikis) have been doing things to date, which has 
been rather successful in most respects.

-Mark