Hello Alec, it is so interesting that you mentioned the idea of the board as a government. It reminds me of a blog post of Gerard during the election in which he said that he is candidating but he don't want to be a politician. And that blog post again reminds me of something happened earlier in the Wikipedia-history, when the position Bureaucrats were created. I believe (if I am wrong, then please correct me) Tim said that time that the name Bureacrat is deliberately selected because it has such a bad taste in it. It should remind everyone who takes that position that he should not act as a bureaucrat. It should even discourage people to take that position. I chatted with Gerard later on IRC about his blog post. I told him that I believe a board member is actually a politician, because what the board is doing is politics: It is distributing resources. And that is what the politics does (the idea is not from me, I read it in the Mars-trilogy from Kim Stanley Robinson and I suppose he got it from some politology studies).
So if you ask me, I would say as a board member I am a politician, and by doing this I just want to remind myself of the fact, that I don't want to be that kind of politician whom we all find disgusting: smiling into cameras and making decisions according to the chance to win the next election. And if you say the board should be a government, than I hope that it is not a government that will avoid make decisions just because it is a hard decision, and only make decisions that looks good. Greetings Ting Am 24.06.2011 03:46, schrieb Alec Conroy: > On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dal...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> It is not good enough to just do things right, you need >> to be seen to do things right. > I just can't emphasize Thomas's point enough. I spent a lot of words > trying to say what he was able to say in a single sentence. > > It isn't enough to get the right answer-- you have to be overtly seen > to be getting the right answer via the right process. There are > millions of us participating, and we want that number to be hundreds > of millions or more. Not millions of viewers, millions of > participants and 'shareholders'. > > That means that in some ways, we have to think more like a government > than like a non-profit corporation. I cringe when I say that, > because I know there ware a LOT of negative baggage that comes with > that. But it's true. We're an organization that interacts with > millions and millions of people in a way that has never before been > possible in human history. > > That means we have to do things a little differently, sometimes, than > a traditional nonprofit might. By and large, I think our leaders > have done a marvelous job of adapting the structure of a "non-profit > corporation" to meet our needs at the time. We just have to always > remember that we don't just "publish a product", we aid a movement-- > and that brings a very different set of challenges. > > :) We're learning, and there's also a widespread understanding that > we need a "new openness" to spark more involvement. I predict a good > year full of amazing innovation. > > Alec > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Ting Ting's Blog: http://wingphilopp.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
