Excellent set of questions
Sanjaya wrote:
As for Gender Parity, the Board should have power to nominate 1-5 members if the elected representation is not 50-50 parity. Thus, I am proposing a Board that is definitely more than 9. But, it is flexible.
That's an interesting approach. So if after an election cycle there aren't enough of a certain gender, or there's no one from, say, the Pacific, then the new Board's first order of business would be to appoint people to join their ranks to meet those requirements? I could support that, in fact I think I like that better than not seating nominees who have received enough votes to hold a seat.
Roles and responsibilities of members be clearly defined, and WikiEd members should have the right to re-call the elected representatives, if they do not perform satisfactorily. Am I sounding too complex?
No, I think you're raising a good point. There should be some sort of extraordinary procedure to recall Board members and even to hold new elections should the Board somehow have been dissolved.
COL President should be patron of WikiEd Board, but, ideally he/she should be the Chair of the Board and the Executive Director as the Member Secretary.
My understanding is that Sir John is our patron in a personal capacity, and that he'll remain such even should he leave his post at CoL. I do not support the patron being on the Board itself, instead I see a role in which as an interested, respected, yet impartial figure he could, hopefully rarely if ever, be called on to make decisions under extraordinary circumstances, such as an electoral irregularity or something like that.
In other words, imagine the Board as parliament, the Executive Director as PM, and the patron as sovereign.
WikiEducator's Patron
We are very privileged to have Sir John Daniel as WikiEducator's founding patron.
For the record, around the time of the Tectonic Shift Think Tank meeting in Vancouver, members from the community asked whether we could invite Sir John as the founding patron of the WikiEducator project. This request was circulated to the Interim Advisory Board. With unanimous support we extended an official invitation to Sir John which he graciously acceppted.
Therefore, Sir John would be able to remain as Patron of WikiEducator in the event that he leaves his position at COL -- assuming that he chooses to continue in this role (and we all hope he will). However, this is Sir John's choice.
In Sir John's official capacity as CEO and President of COL, he has been a pillar of support for the WikiEducator project. I am grateful for Sir John's foresight and leadership recognising the strategic importance of OERs in learning for development and the conviction to provide COL support for the WikiEducator project. WikiEducator, to the best of my knowledge, is the only wiki project of its kind that is officially supported by an International agency. This attests to Sir John's leadership.
