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< Misplaced Pages:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2008 | Candidate statements

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Jayvdb

“ I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a cold-blooded revolutionary. ”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Editors note, Fear and Loathing in America by Douglas Brinkley. ISBN 0747553459, p.xvi.
See Wikiquote for another apt alternative of this quote.)

Hi. My name is John Vandenberg. I have "outed" myself on my userpage. Nothing too exciting, however I feel it is very important that arbitrators are real people. It is not necessary that their real name is known, but it is important that their formal education and experience is known, in order that the community can make informed decisions about who to vote for, and so that people coming to the committee for arbitration can get a feel for the people making the decisions.

I served as a Arbitration Clerk for much of the first half of 2008, and this experience and the termination of it was an eye opener. I am aware of the responsibility, workload and difficulty involved, and still wish to put my name down - more fool me.

My commitments:

  1. I will not edit policy pages or influence policy. This is the responsibility of the community, and arbitrators should not write the policies that they will use in decisions.
  2. I will oppose any remedy that that is not substantially grounded on existing policy that was written by the community, or on resolutions passed by the Wikimedia Foundation.
  3. I will be highly active and available, and will step down and turn in my "access" if I am no longer carrying my share of the load.

I will bring to the committee the following:

  1. Broad technical skills to automate tasks that the committee regularly performs, and improve processes where possible.
  2. Broad experience and exposure to the culture and leaders of most of the WMF projects
  3. Broad language skills - I can only write in English, however I enjoy working with foreign languages and people who don't have a good grasp of English.

Whilst on the committee, my mission for reform within the committee and arbitration process will be to:

  1. Encourage participatory democracy.
  2. Fire the slackers and the lurkers and people whose term is up.
  3. Require that arbitration cases have a clear scope before they open.
See here for more detailed explanations of these three points.