Re: [Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees
On 2/2/12 12:26 AM, Risker wrote: On 1 February 2012 18:17, Theo10011de10...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 4:06 AM, Riskerrisker...@gmail.com wrote: In what way do chapter-selected seats improve the running of the WMF, Thomas? The Board has no say in who is being selected, and there is no basis in fact to say that those appointed by the chapters are any more effective or helpful in meeting the Board's goals or running the WMF than would community-elected Wikimedians. Risker, you know the point applies to appointed members of the board as well. They are selected through even a more private process for seemingly unlimited terms, they make up the other half of the board. I am surprised why questions about their interest and representation aren't raised on every new appointment? The chapter selected member, at least go through a vetting and a voting process that is open to several chapters and thousand of members. The appointed members of the Board are chosen for their specific expertise and skill-set. The Board does publicly identify the slots it is trying to fill when looking for appointees, and the qualifications that they require. The chapter-selected seats...nobody knows what criteria are being used, what specific expertise is being sought, what skill-set is being selected for. The end result, as best I can see from the first two rounds, is the same people who could easily have run for election, because they're well known and widely active in the community. Risker/Anne As in... Michael Snow ? Who is a fabulous guy, ran in community election, and was turned down ? Florence ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees
As in... Michael Snow ? Who is a fabulous guy, ran in community election, and was turned down ? Florence Domas? I do not think we respect him less because of that. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees
On 2/3/12 11:15 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote: As in... Michael Snow ? Who is a fabulous guy, ran in community election, and was turned down ? Florence Domas? I do not think we respect him less because of that. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Domas was not a chapter proposition :) Until now, chapter propositions have been Arne, Phoebe and Michael. Michael was turned down by community. Aware he would be a great asset, he was appointed by the board first, then proposed by chapters second to extend his time on the board. He was a great choice. I do not know if Phoebe would have been community elected or not. She did not try. I can only guess that if she were not chosen this year by chapters, she could very well be community elected in the future because she is obviously very involved and doing good stuff. Excellent secretary as well. As for Arne... I may be wrong but I think he would not have been willing to run for community elections. I also think he was a good choice. We may not have enough years of experience to be able to draw serious conclusions regarding chapter selections quality. But the two sessions draw good names. I think it makes sense to get board members selected by the community and board members selected by chapters because the focus is different. I'd love to see members selected by the community being active editors, involved on a regular basis on the project with editorial and soft development activities. And I also love seeing board members selected by the chapters being more involved with the organizational side of things (finances, legal, partnership and so on). Both sides are necessary. Chapters are not so good to identify good representants of the editorial community. And the community is not so good at selecting board members with specific expertise and knowledge on the organizational side of things. Both selections complement each other greatly. My regret though is that the community tend to reelect the same people over time, as long as they candidate again and WMF did not do anything outrageously wrong. The inconvenience of this is that board members are naturally pushed away from editorial activity (not enough time, fear of legal responsibilities etc.). And the outcome is that the board may be less and less in touch with the realities of the projects themselves. It may be one of the benefits from drawing candidates to the board from at least these 3 different pools (community, chapters, appointed) to balance the risk of a board getting too stable. I would not object if the current WMF board would restructure the system so that board members be selected from 4 different pools (such as community, chapters, appointed, groups of interest). I think it would add a diversity and a pinch of instability which may perhaps lack a little bit right now. Florence ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees
On 3 February 2012 12:57, Florence Devouard anthe...@yahoo.com wrote: I do not know if Phoebe would have been community elected or not. She did not try. I can only guess that if she were not chosen this year by chapters, she could very well be community elected in the future because she is obviously very involved and doing good stuff. Excellent secretary as well. It would be bizarre for the chapters to select any incumbent board member - these are the people who voted unanimously twice for the image filter, the second time in the face of the first time nearly causing a project fork. WM-DE in fact passed a resolution against an image filter. The chapters would be negligent in their duty if they were to ignore candidates' positions on such movement-splitting issues. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees
I think it makes sense to get board members selected by the community and board members selected by chapters because the focus is different. I'd love to see members selected by the community being active editors, involved on a regular basis on the project with editorial and soft development activities. And I also love seeing board members selected by the chapters being more involved with the organizational side of things (finances, legal, partnership and so on). Both sides are necessary. Chapters are not so good to identify good representants of the editorial community. And the community is not so good at selecting board members with specific expertise and knowledge on the organizational side of things. Both selections complement each other greatly. Not that I disagree, but I think this invites us to think what actual role the chapters have. Indeed, my impression (which might be wrong since I have never performed any statistical analysis) is that the majority of the chapter board members (and, for this purpose, the majority of participants of this mailing list) are somewhat disentangled from the editing process - at least often I check their contribution on their home page I find a laughable amount of edits in the article namespace, for instance, a two-digit amount per year. (I know there are exceptions). I remember some time ago it was a discussion of the threshold for voters at the community Board elections with the main idea that it is sometimes difficult to people included in governance to have 50 edits in half a year, even if the edits made after the announcement are accepted. I understand that many chapter boards members are just busy with other things, I know they are often administrators and have a lot of contributions in the Wikipedia namespace for instance, I understand that the task of chapter boards is not writing articles, and I do not want to accuse anybody - but still, is this exactly what we had in mind when chapters were created? Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees
On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 12:26 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: The appointed members of the Board are chosen for their specific expertise and skill-set. The Board does publicly identify the slots it is trying to fill when looking for appointees, and the qualifications that they require. The chapter-selected seats...nobody knows what criteria are being used, what specific expertise is being sought, what skill-set is being selected for. The end result, as best I can see from the first two rounds, is the same people who could easily have run for election, because they're well known and widely active in the community. Risker/Anne Do you mean that the selection by the community applies some neutral parameters? Do you mean that all users participating in the elections through the community use these neutral parameters to put their vote. Do you mean that the other seats are assigned with open and transparent process? I would know if your criticism is applied for the process of selection of all seats or only for the seats of the chapters because in this last case you miss something. And this something is exactly the neutral evaluation of the whole process. Ilario ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Hungary Report - January 2012
Dear all, The January 2012 report of Wikimedia Hungary is now available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikim%C3%A9dia_Magyarorsz%C3%A1g/January_2012 . For your convenience, it is reproduced below. Best regards, Bence Damokos, Wikimedia Hungary *Wikimedia Hungary Report* *Vol 5 Issue 1* *January 2011* *Prepared by: Bence Damokos* This is an update on Wikimédia Magyarország's activities covering January 2012. Reports covering the September - December 2011 period have been prepared but due to a server crashhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikim%C3%A9dia_Magyarorsz%C3%A1g/January_2012#Server_crash they will only be released at a later time. Meetings During the month of January we had one general membership meetup and a board meeting. The membership meetup was aimed at community building and discussing ongoing projects and ideas. The main reason for the board meeting was to admit three new members. With the admission of the newest members, Wikimedia Hungary now has 60 members. Employee January has been a great leap professionally for Wikimedia Hungary by hiring Tamás Mészöly as our office manager in charge of most administrative duties and special projects we assign to him. He has started working at the end of December, but due to holidays, January was his first full month. His first main tasks have been setting up the office (telephone, printer, access to the bank account), working with our accountant, members and board on closing the books on 2011 and as gesture towards our partners, ordering and sending out our greetings cards. Server crash On or around 11 January the RAID controller component of a server hosting our websites and a number of web services (like our membership application form, among others) has crashed and due to an error of the replacement controller some data has been corrupted. We have already migrated essential services (like e-mail) to our own serverhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikim%C3%A9dia_Magyarorsz%C3%A1g/February_2011#Toolserver, and are working on restoring and recreating the content that was stored on the crashed server (and obviously, implementing an off-site backup solution). In the mean time, wikimedia.hu redirects to our Meta-Wiki pagehttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikim%C3%A9dia_Magyarorsz%C3%A1g . Zagreb trip Wikimedia Hungary has received much help from its partners in previous years and we wanted to contribute back this year by encouraging the self-organization of Wikimedia communities in the neighbouring countries and supporting the participation of Wikipedians in the neighbouring regions in Hungarian and regional Wikimedia events. It is this theme that the independently conceived idea of a Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees–Chapters Committeehttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_Committee trips to the region fit into; and as the first step, Ting Chen from the Board of Trustees, and Miloš Rančić (Wikimedia Serbiahttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Serbia) and Bence Damokos (Wikimedia Hungary) from the Chapters Committee visited Zagreb between 20-22 January. On the trip they made contact with and between the local Wikipedians, who have already founded the not-yet-recognized Wikimedia Croatia chapter and a local hackerspace organization called MAMA. The visitors tried to encourage Croatian Wikipedians to have regular meetups (possibly facilitated by a travel costs grant from the Wikimedia Foundation) and to restart the recognition process of Wikimedia Croatiahttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Croatia . The next destination is Sloveniahttp://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedija:Pod_lipo#Obisk_iz_Wikimedie, which we will visit on the weekend of 26 February, on the 10th anniversary celebrationhttp://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedija:V_%C5%BEivo/Desetletnica of the Slovenian Wikipedia. Ongoing projects and project ideas In January a number of projects have started life in the discussion phase and some have gotten to later stages of completeness, however, they will only bear fruit at later times. - We have started working on replenishing our supply of smaller value goody items (pens, pencils, yo-yos, etc.), which will probably continue in February once we find a printer who can confidently print on curving surfaces (for the pencils and other round items we were considering). - We have offered six partial scholarshipshttp://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships for Wikimania 2012, and have approved one travel support request to the Open Wiki GLAM of Serbiahttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Wiki_GLAM_of_Serbia event in February. - Based on the suggestions of Wikimedia Estonia to have a dedicated workshop in the summer, we have begun thinking on what resources we could mobilize to help the development of Wikipedias in Finno-Ugric languages (e.g. presentations at conferences, getting students involved, etc.). - We also
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Language committee report - January 2012
See the wiki version here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Reports/2012-01 This is the language committee report for January 2012 (and also December 2011). === 2011 report === * MF-Warburg wrote a relevant report for the year 2011, see http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:News/2011_report. === Approvals === * The Wikipedia in Veps (a Uralic language spoken by about 6,000 people) has been created. http://vep.wikipedia.org/ * The Wiktionary in Punjabi (in Shahmukhi script) has been created. http://pnb.wiktionary.org/ * The Wikisource in Marathi has been created. There is a bit of content on the OldWikisource (that still needs to be transferred). However, the Maharashtra Government has promised to provide free content for the Marathi Wikisource. http://mr.wikisource.org/ * The Wikipedia in Lezgian (a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by about 784,000 people) is approved by the committee. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Lezgi === Requests === * Some discussion about the Belarusian Wikisource request. It is very active, but the issue is that it be in both the official and Taraskevica orthography. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikisource_Belarusian_2 * There is a request for a Wikiquote in Oriya/Odia, however there is concern about the language/orthography used on Oriya projects. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikiquote_Oriya ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees
Béria Lima wrote: On 1 February 2012 21:56, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Béria Lima wrote: Risker, there are SEVERAL documents in meta with the guidelines used to elect the Chapter seats. Say that nobody knows is a bit offensive. SEVERAL pages on Meta-Wiki? It's a wonder they haven't been memorized by all members of the Wikimedia community. It's fair to say that there are resources available regarding chapter seats on Meta-Wiki (and provide links!); it isn't really fair to suggest that anyone be familiar with the tangled mess that is Meta-Wiki. I've been editing there for quite some time and I still regularly discover pages and processes (or get frustrated with not being able to find them and create my own). I've always found the chapter seats poorly explained and often misunderstood. If there are resources on Meta-Wiki (or even wikimediafoundation.org) that can clarify some of this to me and others, I'd certainly appreciate links. :-) See 1st message in this thread MZ. You're referring to these links (repeating links isn't a terrible thing to do, particularly in longer threads): * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats/2012/Nominate Sorry, I was a bit unclear, but neither of these were really what I was looking for. I think both of those pages are messy, very internal, and difficult to understand. I started improving https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_of_Trustees to be what I was looking for. :-) MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees
MZ if you understand the process enough to create another page, I don't think you need my help. _ *Béria Lima* http://wikimedia.pt/(351) 925 171 484 *Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. Ajude-nos a construir esse sonho. http://wikimedia.pt/Donativos* On 3 February 2012 21:56, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Béria Lima wrote: On 1 February 2012 21:56, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Béria Lima wrote: Risker, there are SEVERAL documents in meta with the guidelines used to elect the Chapter seats. Say that nobody knows is a bit offensive. SEVERAL pages on Meta-Wiki? It's a wonder they haven't been memorized by all members of the Wikimedia community. It's fair to say that there are resources available regarding chapter seats on Meta-Wiki (and provide links!); it isn't really fair to suggest that anyone be familiar with the tangled mess that is Meta-Wiki. I've been editing there for quite some time and I still regularly discover pages and processes (or get frustrated with not being able to find them and create my own). I've always found the chapter seats poorly explained and often misunderstood. If there are resources on Meta-Wiki (or even wikimediafoundation.org) that can clarify some of this to me and others, I'd certainly appreciate links. :-) See 1st message in this thread MZ. You're referring to these links (repeating links isn't a terrible thing to do, particularly in longer threads): * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats/2012/Nominate Sorry, I was a bit unclear, but neither of these were really what I was looking for. I think both of those pages are messy, very internal, and difficult to understand. I started improving https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_of_Trustees to be what I was looking for. :-) MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees
Theo10011, 02/02/2012 00:36: On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Risker wrote: The appointed members of the Board are chosen for their specific expertise and skill-set. The Board does publicly identify the slots it is trying to fill when looking for appointees, and the qualifications that they require. Do you know what any of those criteria are? I'm interested in the answer to this question, too. Nemo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
