Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 1:06 PM, Christophe Henner wrote: > > > 2. Time comitment. So on that, we are actively working on trying to reduce > the mandatory time board members have to allocate to WMF. Goal is between > this year and next year to lower it down to what we

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

Christophe, Thanks for the comments. I think of WMF Board membership as being similar to ENWP Arbcom or some event committee memberships in the sense that doing the roles well often seems to require a near-martyrdom level of commitment. I'd like to see some ceilings on workloads for volunteers,

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

Christophe Thanks for that. You write we are actively working on trying to reduce > the mandatory time board members have to allocate to WMF. Goal is between > this year and next year to lower it down to what we benchmarked as average > (and I can't find the number again, I'll dig into that).

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

Hey, Many topics covered here :) 1. Paid vs. unpaid: I don't know of the legal situation, but I always felt that for a NGO it is better to have a volunteer board. Especially for us as our movement is built thanks to volunteers. I fear it would slightly hinder our message if trustees were paid.

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

Pine, By the same argument, then, the Foundation should be compensating the unpaid volunteers who actually create the content of the projects, and supporting them with the tools and resources they need to do that work. "Rogol" On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 2:52 AM, Pine W wrote:

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

Hi James, Two points: 1. Intrinsic motivation, at this point, appears to be inadequate for increasing the population of the Wikimedia volunteer community. I am skeptical that we should rely on the same mechanism which isn't working in the volunteer community to fill slots on the WMF Board, which

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

Thanks for this. If anyone needs context - There are 10 board seats - The Wikimedia community of editors votes for 3, with all three seats open by 13 August 2017 at latest (WMF sets election date, no date set for election yet) - There are 2 chapter selected seats - Natalia above is talking about

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

Hello, In the last community election a Google employee, a physician, and a Harvard business professor were selected. These are all higher income professions. There were a range of reasons for this, but one commonality to note was that the people favored by the community also might have been

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

I disagree with the suggestion to pay members of the board. Payment does not necessarily mean people will invest more time and a fair bit of literature supports intrinsic motivation resulting in greater engagement than extrinsic motivation. As most of our movement is not only composed of

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

Pine, It's unusual, and discouraged by the IRS (the United States' tax agency), for board members to be paid. I won't get into details, but I think this is a good thing, as it's tough to avoid conflict of interest when earning money from an entity you're seeking to get funding for. You can read a

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

Hi Nataliia, Thanks for the update. An issue that keeps coming to my mind is whether WMF would get higher-quality Board candidates, and whether candidates would devote more time to Wikimedia matters, if Board membership was treated as a part-time job and paid accordingly. Many people who have the

[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Board Recruitment Kick-Off: Changes to the Timeline

Dear all, I have updates about the board recruiting process. As you may recall, March 6 was the original deadline for accepting submissions [1], but we need more time to develop more solid candidates. Our original deadlines were extremely ambitious, thus we decided to extend the deadline by two