On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 5:48 PM, masti <mast...@gmail.com> wrote: > why should tht be decided on foundation level? Do you think communities > are so broken that they cannot make their own decisions? > This would be the only reason to start discussing enforcement of such > major changes >
I personally am not convinced here that we at at the point yet where we have this level of community brokenness, but we are getting very close if we aren't there already. The consensus process used at the individual project level oftentimes breaks down entirely on very contentious issues with as little as a dozen participants in a discussion. Governance by consensus is an important part of our heritage and future, but as currently implemented, it holds us a prisoner of our own inertia in some key areas. This is a major threat to the future of several large WMF projects, and one that has been getting some media attention, particularly by naysayers. I honestly don't think these issues alone can cause us to fail, but I do believe that if ignored long enough, they will create a set of conditions that will allow it to happen. Once conditions become intolerable to the most dedicated members of a community, the possibility of a "mainstream" fork - a fork that takes the bulk of the community with it - begins to become a viable prospect. The fallout, obviously, would be enormous. There are a few readily apparent ways that I see that we can reach such a point. - The projects become ungovernable, and the resulting chaos results in a political (in a wikipolitics sense) fork in order to establish a more viable structure. (Likely, and to some degree in motion already) - The foundation itself goes rogue, and tries to impose conditions unacceptable to it's member communities. (Unlikely, but not inconceivable.) - The foundation proves too unresponsive for the technical needs of the communities it serves. (Likely, already happening to some degree.) - The foundation becomes insolvent. (Possible at some point if fundraising efforts fail.) Our communities and the foundation itself need to look at these as serious "threats from within" to our mission, and decide accordingly how we will deal with them. If we ignore them, and keep our head in the sand, one or more of them may eventually happen, and the outcome won't be pretty. -Steph _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
