340:; Stu West and Jan-Bart de Vreede, who both violate this limit, have both already indicated that their current term (ending in December 2015) will be their last. A technical exception will be made for current trustee Alice Wiegand, who is to satisfy the six-year limit by serving three consecutive two-year terms (her current second term also ends December 2015, and will be renewed). Additionally the terms of service will now be staggered, with elections cycling across all three of the years of a trustee's service: one community-elected seat and two appointed seats one year, two affiliate seats and one appointed seat the next year, and two community-elected seats and one one more board appointment in the last.
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their chapter (in the chapter elections) and then again as members of the community (in the public community elections), under the current schema they are essentially provided a double voting opportunity; nor is there strong evidence that this complexity-inducing bifurcation in voting rights results in the election of trustees distinguishably different from the ones that would otherwise be elected by the community anyway.
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several board officers and a lot of instability, then more board officers and more instability, and now there is a trending demand to make this board and WMF governance more like a comparable organization. A problem with this scheme is that it is very difficult to compare the required strange parts of WMF's governance (founder's seat, community elections, chapter seat system) to that of any other organization. —
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other ways, of course. Why one person who has never been appointed to anything here somehow carries so much sway in an open project a decade and more after its creation simply baffles me. As do their favoured terms, such as "moral ambitiousness". I guess my inability to comprehend all of this is an indication that I live in the sticks, a simple country boy. -
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Well, we could dispense with the "one
Founder" place for starters. It seems to be purely honorific. That position, or rather the prestige that remains attached to it, is more trouble than it is worth and is frankly embarrassing at times. Not that we are incapable of embarrassing ourselves in umpteen
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This board is unusual because of the legacy of unusual circumstances under which it was convened. One of those unusual circumstances was the creation of a founder seat. Knowledge (XXG) could have been a one-person project, but then there were concessions granted to the community that there should be
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Assuming that the elections are a path to good board appointments, then considering this is a volunteer board and historically has been filled by people without financial means that are commensurate with the responsibility of being on this board, then giving them more time could be a way to increase
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I do not know where the rationale is written, but this has been discussed for a long time. The main reason for reform is that 2-year appointments are unusual in the nonprofit sector and it would be expected that if the WMF had a stable board, then the appointments should be longer. A major challenge
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calling for diversity in candidacy, the end result was the election of a Board that will become predominantly white and, with current trustees Phoebe Ayers and Maria
Sefidari now outgoing, mostly male. The second has to do with chapter representation. Because chapter members get to vote as a part of
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The
Wikimedia Foundation was legally incorporated just over 12 years ago, on 20 June 2003. The organization's bylaws were first issued that year, with heavy revisions coming in 2006. The current structure of the Board—ten members, three elected from the community, two elected from the chapters, four
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Chapters, thematic organizations and user groups are part of the community. While chapters and thematic organizations have an exclusive right to select 2 members of the Board, they can also participate in the community selection of another 3 members. To level this artificial separation it could be
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touch upon two themes of definitional importance in the movement today. The first is one of diversity: as the original proposal stated, "Our two different community processes draw from similar pools of candidates, and our searches for appointees have identified few people outside of the US and
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Instead of having an absolute, non-variable number of Board members (currently 3 elected, 2 affiliate selected, 4 appointed, 1 founder), we could change to a more flexible model. For example, we could allow a minimum and a maximum of community-based and external seats, permitting us to add
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To increase diversity of candidates we could start moving towards input from a nominating committee or more active self nominations to create a pool of qualified candidates. This pool could be the base for a selection by the Board or a mixture of selection by the Board and election by the
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on the wikimedia-l mailing list, "An audit of the past year's financials is carried out August-September, the WMF files its U.S. tax return in April, and publishes its annual plan in June. Time commitment is roughly 20 hours over the course of the year." Interested parties should e-mail
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To be clear, this is separate discussion from both the challenges of diversity and the number of seats for specific purposes. This is simply a proposed change on term limits because we want to implement those and it has been on the Agenda of the
Governance Committee for quite a while.
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of the Board of
Trustees is looking for community members with financial and accountancy literacy willing to volunteer as members of the Board's audit subcommittee. Members serve on the committee for a one year period, from July 2015 through July 2016. According to the
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the chance that they will grow into the position to be effective. Consider any organization which you feel is comparable to
Knowledge (XXG), and consider how that organization's board is managed. It will be very different, and this board is very unusual.
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Dropped it in there in bold a little earlier, you're right it was a little buried. Usually you want to give a summary paragraph in the first section of these things, but this is such a complicated topic I needed two paragraphs just to introduce it.
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to this idea could be to say that the WMF does not have a stable board. Already the organization has very unusual appointment process through election by organization members, and that is a strong indication that instability should be the norm.
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remains the only so-called "thorg"). The composition of the Board has nonetheless remained more or less the same in the seven intervening years: three members who were on the Board at the time—now-chair
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is the "ultimate corporate authority" of the
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at the time). The changes being proposed now, six months later, are the result of that feedback and of further institutional rumination by the members of the current Board.
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Europe." Some members of the community have raised concern over this in the follow-up to this years' election, pointing out that despite the publication of a
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in 2008. More minor changes have been made from time to time, with two having occurred since the Board began publicizing these changes in 2013: a
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Providing lower overhead ways to contribute to WMF governance and advise strategic decisions
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additional seats proportionately depending on the present needs of the Board.
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elected by the trustees themselves for expertise and one
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A continuous process of looking for potential trustees
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287:Limiting bureaucracy and/or staff involvement
219:for the three affiliate-selected seats from "
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72:Board of Trustees propose bylaw amendments
688:Knowledge (XXG) Signpost archives 2015-06
18:Knowledge (XXG):Knowledge (XXG) Signpost
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188:was organized, receiving
298:What it could look like
267:What we want to achieve
548:. To follow comments,
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225:thematic organizations
186:community consultation
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630:What do you think of
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462:24 June 2015
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58:24 June 2015
669:Suggestions
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400:Brief notes
338:Jimbo Wales
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