[Osmf-talk] Update of Articles of Association

[Samuel Klein]

Hello,

I'm Sam Klein, a Wikimedia board member and OSM supporter; first time
posting here.  :-)  Two comments:

Wikimedia organized our first real strategic planning session in '09,
and are now reviewing what the different roles across our movement are
(at a point where we have ~35 national/regional chapters and 10 board
members.)  You may find the following whitepaper relevant to some of
these questions:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_roles_working_group/Learnings_from_peer_organizations/Models

Regarding Board observers, we are experimenting this year with having
2 board Visitors, who observe some of the board's work each year.
This was to encourage us to be more open to outside input, and to
allow outside orgs who were interested in how we worked to understand
better our governance.  Our first visitor is a representative from the
Sloan Foundation, who have supported us for 3+ years, and has both
seen many different sorts of boards, and is curious to know more about
our board's work.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Board_visitors

Cheers,
Sam.

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 5:31 PM, James Livingston <doctau at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> - I would support explicitly allowing the board to invite non-board members to their meetings, but I don't really see the utility of having non-voting and/or co-opted members (been that myself more than once, makes for nice business cards, but otherwise?)
>
> One organisation I'm part of traditionally invites the immediate-past president to join, to give some continuity and let them finish off things they started. That makes sense because the president is more than just the chairman, and the whole board changes every year.
>
> As I mentioned in another mail, I'd really like to see some concrete examples of what it would actually be used for.