User:Pundit/Charter

Copied from bit.ly/MCDC-manifesto, where the draft was edited.

The following manifesto results from a breakfast discussion and the following work done on March 9, summing up the concerns from the New York working meeting.

We recognize the immense work the MCDC has put into repeatedly drafting and revising the charter. We also see a need for pragmatism and a much more agile, elegant, and practical approach—in fact, returning to one of the good ideas that the MCDC has previously  discussed.

The current charter draft would benefit from a problem-solving orientation. We are worried that creating a 100+ representative body may lead to stalling, frustration, poor representation, as well as other operational problems (one of the minor ones may be making Wikimania participation much more difficult for newcomers and non-activists), the opposite of what we were collectively hoping to achieve from day one. For all practical purposes, a body of 100+ people can collectively voice their opinions just a few times per year. We do not understand why, for the most critical decisions, this should replace an actual, democratic, wide-community vote, as we do now. Instead, this body could create a bureaucratic assembly, unable to run meaningful and timely discussion-making because of its size and complexity.

We believe that basing the Global Council's purpose and intent on existing, goal-oriented bodies makes a lot more sense and allows for both an incremental deployment and a much lower-risk implementation. It also allows for a relatively light charter structure, that is followed by need-based, detailed solutions.

Thus, we envisage the Global Council to be composed, e.g., of the chairs and vice-chairs of the task-oriented committees:

• The AffCom,
• The FDC (a new global body responsible for resource allocation, possibly e.g. elected based on the regional hubs/funds distribution committees representation),
• The Revenue Streams Committee (responsible for coordinating revenue generation across the Movement, including local fundraising efforts, recognizing the untapped potential of regional resources, such as, e.g., local tax nuances),
• The Tech Committee (a new elected body, allowing for community consultations, advice, and advice on tech-specific issues),
• The Community Committee, taking over LangCom responsibilities, but also responsible for broader project oversight, weak-signals detection, etc.

Each of these committees may need to have a different modality of elections, but we do not have to decide it in the charter - which is also a big plus of the proposed approach. For instance, the Revenue Streams Committee may need to include more people from the WMF and other large organizations from the movement who can be co-opted instead of being directly elected.  Similarly, in some of these committees, the WMF Board may have some representation, liaisons, or nomination powers, and so could the affiliates. However, the Global Council itself should, by design, include only members whom the community has elected, and consequently, by design, each of these committees should have chairs and vice-chairs elected by the community, and in all cases, a clear and large majority.

In each case, it is important to ensure that the largest project(s) do not dominate the whole and that diversity and equity are assured. For instance, the Community Committee may need to be larger to reflect the diversity our movement embraces, and that is okay—there is no need to make a decision about this particular detail right now.

We believe that such a reimagined Global Council will tick several boxes:

• It will be a representative body (as each committee will represent different groups and angles, the election modalities will also differ to increase diversity),
• It will be agile and goal-oriented,
• It will be based on actual expertise: instead of electing “representatives” for the sole purpose of representing (a.k.a. “I want someone on the Council like me”), for each committee, we’d be aiming at selecting the best people for the specific job,
• The movement will be able to elect members of the committees directly and will be guaranteed that only such elected members can join the Global Council,
• It will be best positioned to address and voice concerns about the essential issues and serve as an intermediary with the WMF and its Board, and their fiduciary and legal responsibilities
• For the really most important decisions that require listening to the community, wide-community voting is always better than relying on a large and impractical body whose actual representation and work will be questioned from the very beginning.