[Foundation-l] Re: Bounties and expenses

Wed Jun 23 21:40:21 UTC 2004

Mark,

You've made your point plenty. As a basic and regular suscriber to this
list, I'm getting tired of *your* point of view, not because it's yours but
because I got it enough. When you have nothing to say but to repeat over and
over the same stuff, you're on the verge of spam. Thanks.

JCC
aka Aurevilly on w:fr

PS: not to mention I totally disagree with the fake pragmatism you've
exposed.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Delirium" <delirium at hackish.org>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 11:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Bounties and expenses

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>