Wikimedia recently held elections for the Board of Trustees — and, as in recent elections, elected an excellent candidate, a dedicated community member of long standing, interested in listening and facilitating rather than imposing his will on others.
We were lucky to have great community members running. However the whole process reminded me of class elections in high school and university, where a small minority of active community members were involved with the process at any level; and the candidates were asked to weigh in on broad aspects of community that they would not actually direct in their elected position.
The discussions around the election were about how the community should change and organize itself; whereas the meat of future work is likely to be about structure and facilitation and large-scale ideas about organizing resources and directing them to a common end.
The people who were running, and their friends, and the people who sat on the university council seats and cared about the details of annual elections, they all took the affairs very seriously — monitoring one another’s campaigns, askingo ne another questions, blogging within their circles and even publishing articles in the school appers about the elctions. But in the end, after 4 years, the etent to which campus life had been changed by those few elected officials, compared to how it had been changed by activists taking over parts of campus, or by studetns developing their own campus-wide projects and associations and summer drives, wasn’t terribly significant.
The OLPC community has been working through some big changes recently, and I was recently talking to a couple of friends about the development of the project’s mission. I was defending some of these changes, saying that they were small compared to the margin of error in setting the mission in the first place to achieve the goal of improving education. Mako was part of the conversation, and joked that I was pretty laid back about those changes, while I was much more concerned about the comparatively uncontroversial changes in the Wikimedia bylaws last month.
That made me think for a while. OLPC is an extraordinary education project, the realization of a vision through the hard work and inspiration of a few experts; something we as a society (committed to education, learning, and tool sharing) understand and know could be accomplished again. But Wikipedia feels like the greatest project of our generation, period. It is the realization of something too crazy to have been an articulate vision when it began, with self-organizing infrastructure dependent on general good faith and interest in sharing; something our society still has a hard time imagining could have been accomplished once, not to mention a second or third time. Small founder effects in decisions may influence what future generations think is possible.
So I hold the two projects, and especially their organization, governance, and assignation of organizational responsibility, to quite different standards. If Wikipedia falters, it’s not clear we will get another any time soon.