On 1 September 2011 16:37, Jimmy Wales <jwa...@wikia-inc.com> wrote: > On 8/28/11 1:00 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote: >> I think that developing such a legal entity should be a high priority >> for Brazilian Wikipedians to ensure that Wiki activities in Brazil are >> controlled by Brazilians. At the same time I don't think there is any >> value to having a WMF appointee on your board; such a person would find >> it difficult to function under circumstances of perpetual conflict of >> interest. No other chapter has such a clause. > > I had never thought of this before, but now that it has been mentioned, > I just wanted to disagree, quite respectfully because Ray is awesome of > course, and say that I think it is a very interesting idea to have a WMF > appointee on the boards of chapters. > > There should be very few cases where there is a "conflict of interest" > since chapters and the Foundation are deeply tied together always (and > that's a good thing). I think having a Foundation representative on the > board of chapters does present some possibly insurmountable logistical > issues (who will they be?) but I actually think such an arrangement > might be incredibly valuable for improving communication and > *decreasing* perceived conflicts of interest.
It's an interesting idea and one I have thought about before, but never come to any firm conclusions. The fact that the chapters and WMF are so closely tied together is, in fact, the reason conflicts of interest are so much of a problem. We rely on the same source of funds, for instance. The WMF wants to spend that money and the chapters want to spend that money. Those interests are in conflict. Hopefully, most of the time we'll be able to agree on who can more effectively spend the money, but that doesn't mean the conflict of interest doesn't exist. Even if the conflict only exists on paper, it's still a problem. Board members of charities are generally required to act in the interests of that charity. That's why the chapter selected members of the WMF board are *not* chapter representatives. They are expected to act in the interests of the WMF, not the chapters. The same would hold of anyone the WMF put on a chapter board. Another problem is percieved independance. WMUK, for example, needs to convince the charity commission that it is an independant entity, otherwise it won't be able to get charitable status. That's hard enough as it is, given all the links to the WMF, but it would be much harder if the WMF could choose board members, even if they were officially not there to represent the WMF. Yet another problem is that chapter boards tend to be working boards. That is, the board members are actively running the chapter's programmes rather than just overseeing them. That's becoming less true for some chapters as they begin to hire staff, but there will always be a lot of chapters that don't have lots of staff (either new chapters or chapters for which hiring staff is not a good idea for whatever reason). I wouldn't expect someone the WMF put on a chapter board to be able to carry out such a role, which means the remainder of the board would have to do more (you can't just make a board bigger without making it significantly less efficient). There are, however, merits to the idea. They are much the same as the merits of having the chapters put people on the WMF board. The WMF needs to work with the chapters effectively and it can do that easier if it has people on board that are familiar with the chapters and how they work. That is equally true if you swap the words "WMF" and "chapters". _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l