On 10 April 2012 13:09, Thomas Dalton <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've asked a very simple question, could you answer it? What questions > do you want this process to answer? What it is about the FDC that we > don't yet know and need to devote a lot of time and money to working > out? The resolution basically says "there will be a committee, it will be powerful, Sue has a draft and can figure out the details". It doesn't tell us... well, anything else. There are recommendations, but those are *proposals* and the community may decide it strongly objects to parts of them - now is a good time to figure it out. Many of the key details are sketchy. Some possible questions I can think of, in ten minutes over my lunchbreak: What limits will there be on what the FDC can recommend? What ability will it have to control funding to WMF itself for non-core spending? How independent will it be of either WMF or the chapters? How will it apply to the "non-chaptered" community? Will it be able to decline to fund Board-recommended projects? Do we need to develop alternative structures for funding work in circumstances impractical under US law? And that is before membership becomes an issue. We argued for weeks earlier in the year about chapter-nominated Board seats - who exactly will sit on the FDC? Will they be elected or appointed; what will the mix of community members versus professionals be? Will there be any non-chapter community members? What will be the legal constraints on its membership? Who are the elected members, if any, answerable to? >From my position - and I haven't been following this overly closely, I admit - the FDC looks like it will be a remarkably powerful body; it will have a major impact on any major project not done directly by WMF. It may not have the same power as the board to set overall goals, but it will have a great deal of de-facto control over the implementation of those goals. A lot of our governance problems (or perceptions of governance problems) stem from the fact that the "movement" evolved organically from a very different thing six or seven years ago, and is perhaps not the organisation we would have designed had we a blank sheet today. Given all this, it definitely seems a good idea to have a detailed look at how it is going to work rather than just bash something together. I can imagine that if the resolution had said "...and directs the Executive Director to pick six people and have the first meeting in May", there would have been an immense outcry that we *weren't* taking the opportunity to think it through, that it was a power grab, etc etc etc... -- - Andrew Gray [email protected] _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
