User:Volunteer Marek/Proposal

Proposal for a monthly committee report from the Arbitration Committee

Over the years the issues of lack of transparency and insufficient communication with the community perennially arise during the tenure of the committee and especially during the election. And equally perennially we, the community, are promised more transparency and better communication. Once elected however, these promises never materialize into action. To my knowledge, no concrete steps have ever been taken to remedy what appear to be genuine and mostly valid concerns. Indeed, the frustration with the committee along these two dimensions has actually intensified due to the way in which some recent cases have been handled. The following proposal is a suggestion to improve this situation.

Proposal

• The committee will appoint one of its members as a Spokesperson to act as a general point-person for communicating with the community.
• The Spokesperson will be responsible for composing and issuing biweekly (monthly?) Committee Reports which inform the community of the activities of the committee, in general terms.
• The Committee Reports will be logged in a devoted project page. The talk page of this log will be a place for the members of the community to raise additional issues and ask questions. These will be addressed by the Spokesperson or other committee members, at their discretion.

Committee Reports

The Committee Reports will be brief descriptions of what the committee had been discussing during the previous two weeks. They should be general and should eschew information regarding what specific positions on particular cases individual members hold. Obviously, the reports should also not contain any personal information. Since the committee generally deals with confidential and private information the role of the Spokesperson should be taken seriously as care must be taken that no such info is presented. However, since we as a community trust the Arbitrators with access to such in the first place, implicitly we also trust them to communicate skillfully, in a way which does not compromise such info.

The content of the reports should be at the discretion of the Spokesperson, as directed by the committee. During low-intensity time periods these can be as simple as "No report". During open cases they should inform the community of which cases the committee has discussed and roughly to what extent, what stage the work of the committee on a particular case is at (for example "we're preparing to draft Findings of Facts in the Moozle-Foozle Case") and some indication of the over all workload of the committee. The reports will also be the appropriate venue to make the community aware of any resignations, recusals, absences and sabbaticals.

Overall, the reports should focus on WHAT the committee is doing not HOW it is doing it.

It should be noted that since the author of this proposal, like overwhelming majority of the active community of editors, has never been on the committee and has no access to the committee's email list or deliberations, there are undoubtedly aspects of the committee's activity that I have failed to highlight, which could also be included in the reports. In fact, a good part of the rationale behind this proposal is that these reports will allow "regular editors" to understand what it is exactly that the committee does and how it does it.

Rationale and conclusion

This proposal is motivated by the fact that, simply put, this is how committees function in real life. Most committees in both the public and private sector deal with sensitive information yet most of them have a streamlined, standardized process for communicating with the relevant stakeholders. Since this has been a reoccurring issue over the years and one which has never formally been remedied, this proposal addresses a vital need and hopefully will improve both the trust in the committee, as well as remind as all that we are building this project together.