[Foundation-l] A proposal for organisation

Sun Jun 18 21:41:25 UTC 2006

Anthere wrote:

>Jan Kulveit wrote:
>  
>
>>One dissimilarity - what are the "projects"? In the sense of ASF it
>>may be Wikipedia, Wikinews, Commons, etc.  Here the projects are 
>>language versions of "meta-projects". 
>>Commiters have common languages - code and English. Wikimedia 
>>projects do not. You can hardly effectively oversight a Wikimedia 
>>project if you dont understand the language. => question - if you take 
>>board members and their freinds, and maybe even theirs friends, does it 
>>cover the spectrum of Wikimedia languages? I would guess it doesn't.
>>    
>>
>If course it does not...
>I would be tempted to say that Wikimedia projects are the projects (so, 
>Wikipedia, Wikinews etc...), rather than by breaking down to language. 
>Why so ? Because even if they have a different language, the various 
>language versions share the same goals (or precisely *should* share the 
>same goal), the same needs and the same threats.
>
>A direction of thought would be to examine to areas of authority of the 
>PMC. Here are my suggestions
>* ensuring all projects are following the same goal
>
This is really a question of how detailed the goal will be.  The goal of 
building an encyclopedia is general enough, as is ensuring NPOV, but 
once you get away from general pronciples and start to micromanage the 
whole thing will fall apart.  As the goals become more detailed ensuring 
should not depend imply enforcing.

>* overseeing tm issues (the project logo, the project tm, domain names...)
>* overseeing the general threats facing this particular project (legal 
>threats faced by wikiquote are definitly different from those faced by 
>Wikipedia)
>* overseeing the licencing issue of the project (note that this 
>naturally occured when wikinews chose another set of licensing... for 
>all language version wide)
>* oversee technical needs (wikiversity or wiktionary needs are specific 
>to a project, not to a language version)
>
>etc...
>
>Naturally, the PMC can not cover all languages version. But if that 
>committee has 20 members (for example), I guess they will always cover 
>more languages than the current board ;-)
>
PMCs are not needed for all projects in all languages.  A small language 
project may do quite well with a one man governance model, and may very 
much benefit from that even if that person has dictatorial tendencies.  
However, as these projects grow applied governance models should grow 
with them until they are big enough to need a full-scale PMC

>>Another dissimilarity is in the existence of local chapters. How do
>>they fit in the above scheme?
>>    
>>
>I do not see why local chaters would get a specific involvement in the 
>PMC scheme.
>They could get involved in the membership scheme by also having up to a 
>certain number of representative on the Foundation.
>
Some level of chapter involvement in both the Foundation and PMCs is 
lkely desireable, but for different reasons.  At the Foundation level 
they would participate in co-ordinating responses to the legal 
situations in each country.  At the project level they could would 
likely help to co-ordinate issues relating to national dialects.  In 
French it would make sense if Canadian, Belgian and Swiss chapters were 
represented on the PMC for each French language project.

Ec