[Foundation-l] Volunteer Council - A shot for a resolution

Fri Mar 14 04:02:47 UTC 2008

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:07 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>  I think that is exactly the right direction to go, as it's a logical
>  continuation of what has already happened on all levels of the
>  organization: people's roles and responsibilities become more and more
>  closely aligned with their core competencies. And that's a normal part
>  of organizational growth:

That is not an obvious corollary to organizational growth.  If
everyone has access to advisors with extensive expertise, it isn't
clear why specialist experience should be more of a factor in
assigning responsibilities than commitment, ideals, or openness to the
good ideas of others.

>  As a community, we've built one of the largest websites of the world
>  on a shoestring budget, not to mention the development of the
>  MediaWiki software itself, which has become adopted by thousands of
>  sites around the world. We haven't commercialized, we haven't

Hey, you're underselling MediaWiki here :-)

>  But there are challenges, both on the organizational level and in the
>  community. For example, in the community, we do not really have
>  clarity about
>  - how we decide that a certain software feature can be activated, or
>  that a particular partnership is OK,
>  - who the community actually is, and how we drive more participation,
>  - how to properly provide oversight for the use of the various
>  community privileges like "checkuser", "oversight", etc.
>  - what the relationships between chapters and communities will evolve into,
>  - what to do when a community becomes dysfunctional, and how to
>  resolve conflicts beyond the scope of a single project becomes
>  necessary,
>  - what the future of our smaller projects will be, what
>  reorganizations may be needed, and what new initiatives we may want to
>  focus on
>  etc. etc.
>
>  These are all the kinds of challenges that I would hope a V.C. could
>  address, if not solve. On the organizational level, we have the known

An interesting idea. I see the potential perceived disempowerment of
the community as one more factor inhibiting people from resolving
these issues.

A V.C. set up to advise and inform and respond to the community,
rather than one to govern or rule or attempt to enforce anything,
sounds like a universally valuable and constrjuctive idea.  Then it's
a matter of finding people willing to commit time and energy to better
informing and organizing the input of others, for a fixed term...
selecting people for their capacity as facilitators and ombudsmen.
How much stronger we would be with clearer channels to cultivate and
thank our great facilitators.

At its worst, a V.C. would be a channel for people who like to
legislate, to direct others, to decide what is best and what is worst.
 These people would see themselves as saving the community, while
dampening its natural capacity to resolve complex problems.  Community
members who don't recognize that natural capcaity might encourage such
a V.C. to go on to 'take responsibility' for all complex issues facing
the community: the layout and design of Main Pages and sidebars,
categorization and classification techniques, filtering policies,
checkuser policies, &c.  This could easily become a nightmare.

>  In answer to 1), I think Mike's help will be critical - we might need
>  to specify certain limitations in the Bylaws, for example. Even with
>  such explicit provisions, we'll want to be careful who the initial
>  Board members would be - I'd prefer to have at least some
>  professionals who have existing ties to the organization, and perhaps
>  also to have an acculturation process for new Board members.

I confess that I can't think of a single benefit to having a
professional on the Board with no ties to Wikipedia and its sister
projects.  Can you list one or two possibilities?

Warmly,
SJ