- Dank's proposal
I see that several people have responded to this week's Signpost story with the suggestion of some sort of election. I'll help out, whether I'm elected or not, if there's an election of a board of around 11 to 15 people who are directed to gather and present data, to try to get more people involved, and to experiment with trial RFA formats for 3 months. The board would have no authority to promote admins themselves, but hopefully they will convince Wikipedians that their methods and recommendations on who should be promoted at the end of the 3 months are likely to be accepted at RFA; the more persuasive they are, the more likely they are to attract new voters and new candidates to participate. We don't need an RFC to approve this ... anyone can form a group and make recommendations ... but we probably won't be able to get wide "buy-in" unless a lot of people show up to vote in the election. Only a board will be flexible and agile enough to get the job done; RFC voters generally aren't interested in substantive discussions on something as complicated as RFA reform, as demonstrated in every RFC we've tried.
The next step, I think, is to advertise that a bunch of us are going to experiment and make an honest effort to make the RFA culture more receptive to a wide range of views. Right now, a lot of Wikipedians, as individuals and as groups, stay away from RFA, and they blame RFA for that, and that degrades the effectiveness not just of RFA, but also of admins and non-admins who perform admin-related tasks ... that is, it degrades the effectiveness of exactly the people we can least afford to degrade. My questions are: where do we advertise, and how do we convince people that this time is different, that participation on their part will be rewarded by at least a set of recommendations that is more likely to reflect their preferences than what we've got now?