[Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

Thu Jun 15 07:25:38 UTC 2006

Michael R. Irwin wrote:

>Jimmy Wales wrote:
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>>Brion Vibber wrote:
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>>>I'm curious.
>>>
>>>What can the board and management (whatever its structure) *do* that will be better?
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>snip
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>> 
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>>>What are examples of things a hypothetically ideal management would do *right*
>>>that the present management is not?
>>>   
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Some of the areas where we have been failing is in the timely
>>negotiation of partnerships which are consistent with our charitable
>>mission and which would both reduce our reliance on fund drives, and
>>increase our abilities to meet our charitable goals.  We are doing a
>>great job in some areas (English, German, French, Japanese, and several
>>other European languages), a decent job in some areas (Chinese is not
>>bad, Arabic shows promise), and a fairly poor job in other areas (Hindi,
>>Swahili, Bengali, etc.)
>>
>> 
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>>>If there's something that management needs to *do* which will actually be better
>>>served by a new management structure or new board members, then by all means
>>>let's talk about it, but let's not put the cart before the horse.
>>>
>>>What first, then how.
>>>   
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>What is a functioning Wikiversity.
>
>How.   Perhaps rather than simply launching our own producing some 
>innovation from peer based free knowledge production we should consider 
>canning the Wikiversity proposal and contacting these folks regarding 
>partnering opportunities:
>
>http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks:Staff_lounge&action=edit&section=8
>
>They may be resistant at because it sounds line they are lining up 
>corporate funding to pay the content creators.   Obviously this is a bit 
>at odds for our type of distributed production of free content where 
>everyone contributes as they can and will.
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I forgot.   They might also be interested in mirroring our controlled 
version content on their computing resources and sending editors to 
us.   If this requires complicated programming beyond what our capable 
developers can tackle easily given their current workloads or strange 
platforms perhaps they can interest their computer departments in doing 
the develop with either funded or unfunded groups.

We get free robust mirrors in exchange for managing the content 
development environment.  Their departments and students are not 
responsible for managing the content development issues such as the 
growing troll, deeply hidden link spam, and copyright/slander issues.

Once they do the development should be plenty of  U.S. technical 
universities with similar environements and walla!   Our explosive 
scaling problem is over!.    We can dedicate funds to growing a small 
professional staff and keeping up with the impending explosive growth in 
editors.

regards,
lazyquasar