Just as a matter of record: While I did contribute comments to the concept of the council, and am in general very much in favour of such council, I also made the comment that I don't think the council in its current shape addresses the real problems at all - because it has one responsibility (appointing board members) that will distract from what I thinktheir actual work: giving a platform for the WMF board/staff and potentially chapters to get constructive input from the community.
It is not that I find their opinions unacceptable, but they are trying to solve a different perceived problem. In the current shape, I couldn't support the council, unfortunately - both for the reason I mention above as some more practical concerns. I don't want a perception to arise that I would support the concept you link. Lodewijk On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 2:33 AM, Milos Rancic <[email protected]> wrote: > Denny, thanks for supporting this issue moving on. Before few remarks > I would respond inline, I want to say that the *draft* of the idea to > make community assembly have been published by Pharos: > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_Council_Compact > > I want to give a small background of our work on the proposal: > > Richard approached me immediately after I sent the first email from > this thread, so we started to work on it. It turned out that we had > very different perspectives of what should be done. However, we worked > on creating a synthetic proposal, which would cover both sets of > ideas. > > I wanted to make a joke-spoiler, but I want to restrain of it because > I want to see if the differences between our approaches are actually > the differences between different cultural/continental background. > > Besides two of us, Lodewijk and Lane contributed, mostly with > comments. It turned out that Lodewijk was on the line I started my > idea in discussion with Richard, while Lane was on the line started by > Richard. Both of them found unacceptable the opposite part. > > If so, I'd like to ask everybody to try to understand that our future > assembly should be generally acceptable to everybody, no matter of > cultural differences; which means that we should have to reach > consensus in such issues, not limited on Richard's and my approaches > in particular. > > Besides that, it's just a draft of the proposal and everything could > be changed as long as we reach consensus about one final proposal. I > am fine with it as long as Wikimedians get a framework to communicate > and make decisions which matter to themselves. > > On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 1:26 AM, Denny Vrandecic > <[email protected]> wrote: > > You write that Board members tend to think of themselves as the governing > > body. At least for myself, I can say that this is not the case. My > > understanding restricts the Board only to the role of being the Board of > > the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation is not the community. The Board > is > > not the voice of the community for the Foundation. The community is > neither > > lead by the Foundation, nor by the Board. I don't even think there is a > > community - there are numerous overlapping communities. > > This is misunderstandings, unless you want to say you don't see Board > as the governing body of Wikimedia Foundation :P > > > It seems to me that in open collaborative projects like ours, the amount > of > > scrutiny and criticism a governance body receives is negatively > correlated > > to the amount of competences it has. Creating or deleting content, > banning > > disruptive users from a project, deciding how the energy of the community > > should be spent on creating content? None of these is the business of the > > Board. None of these is the competence of the Board. And that’s good. > > This part is very important! There are no "open collaborative projects > like ours". You are not a Board of Reddit with admins controlling > content. Our social structure and civilization implications are far > beyond any of those projects. That's why WMF members -- as long as > there is no community-wide body -- have to have vision, wisdom and > balls. The basis of the most of my criticism of the Board lays in the > fact that it collectively have never shown all three virtues at once. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > New messages to: [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
