[Foundation-l] Voting suffrage criteria (established members should be able to vote)

Sat Jun 28 10:03:20 UTC 2008

Michael Snow wrote:
> I don't agree with the solution proposed, but the situation illustrates 
> more generally some of the problems with our election system. Let me 
> provide another illustration.
> 
> We had a meetup this past week attended by a number of people involved 
> in Wikimedia projects. The group included several researchers who have 
> worked on Wikipedia, studied its social dynamics, especially how 
> policies are used and applied, and presented papers to academic 
> conferences on these issues. These are people with a good understanding 
> of the community and I think they would be well-suited to participate 
> intelligently in the process of choosing board members. Nevertheless, 
> some of these same people do not actually have enough edits to vote in 
> the election, even though they've studied the community more closely 
> than most of those who did vote.

This is very interesting. Have many of them been approached
to join the advisory committee?

> Over time, the elections are also showing the same edit-count creep that 
> manifests itself in the selection of administrators on mature projects. 
> The effect is to increasingly exclude people who should have been 
> considered part of the community. I don't have easy solutions for how to 
> address this while still preventing manipulation through sockpuppet 
> accounts and the like, but this is one reason we added a second method 
> for the community to choose board members through the chapter selection 
> process. In the chapter setting, participation is more clearly related 
> to individual identity, and it goes some distance toward offering the 
> membership system that was originally contemplated, whose failure to 
> implement some people still lament.
> 
> --Michael Snow

I think one of the biggest positive sides for the current
restructuring is that it prevents the "eggs in one basket"
problem. Staying with a sole method of gaining trusteeship,
that method itself could have with time morphed into quite
unrepresentative, and not just for the reasons you cite, but
for too various reasons to even enumerate.

If we are lucky, the three different methods of board
entry will vie to not be the one to draw most ire from
our resident loudmouths. <invokes generic charm for
good luck>

I think another good point you make is the one that by
default, chapters will be immune from socking in the
sense in which we know it on wikipedia, though of course
infiltration by real world organisations is not forever
out of the question, once the real world begins to
consider us important enough.

It is a mistake though to consider the chapter route to
specifically redress the problem of exclusion from the
system of many people who should be in it.

Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen