Thoughts on exceptions
Hi Anil,
Great start on the consensus document.
Some thoughts on the exception:
Declarations from the founder, OER Foundation and WikiEducator Community Council, particularly for copyright, legal issues, or server load, have policy status
Personally I don't think that the Founder, OER Foundation, WCC have any preferential rights pertaining to consensus. ALL wikieducators should strive to achieving consensus in their work. At the same time we should not confuse governance with a recommended process for decision-making in WE.
In areas where consensus cannot be achieved and where the issue at hand may have community-wide impact -- the could for example defer to Council for arbitration on a contentious matter (but I would suggest only those issues which will have a community wide impact. Regarding content related matters, perhaps WE would consider an arbitration Workgroup or something like this to help achieve consensus.
Just a few initial thoughts.
Dear Dr. Wayne,
Definitely it is a very interesting start. In a policy we have to list out exceptions, if any. The mentioning of the declarations of the founder is just a translation from wikipedia. The intention is not to make some individuals extraordinary, but to list out types of content that will exist without subjecting to wider community consensus process. Discussions on which might have taken place and arrived at conclusions somewhere else. It can be policies based on which this community platform has come into effect, statements of facts or proceedings of the benefactors, legal statutes relating to cyber space etc etc. However I can understand the embarrassment an ardent FLOSS proponent like you may feel while somebody talk for your privilege…so it is amended in the draft under development <smile>.
Anil Prasad 09:37, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
Hi Anil,
You can rest assured that I'm not embarrassed by the draft proposals at all :-) That said, I wouldn't be true to my values if I didn't raise concerns about undue privilege afforded to historical contributors. I believe that our yardstick for judging inclusion in guidelines and policy documents should be justifiable reasoning --- not the number of edits or historical "status" in the community ;-).
Our collective interest is to develop the best policies and guidelines we can! I recognise that the first draft is essentially a copy of the WP policy. A great place to start and gives us something to think about and refine.
We're off to an excellent start. I'm going to attempt a straw dog proposal on the same page -- largely because I'd like to experiment with the structure of the document -- which is difficult to do in a normal edit mode.
Let's see how this approach works -- we may need to reject the straw dog in the end, but I think it will help us refine the proposals.
Cheers
Hi,
Thats a wonderful idea. I am confident that it will provide us with a genuine WE policy.
