[Foundation-l] Board-announcement: Board Restructuring

Mon Apr 28 12:10:32 UTC 2008

Hello,

> Honestly, a few months participating in the projects hands on
> would give the Board and staff a much better idea of who they're
> working for. It's not for your large donors. It's not for potential
> venture capitalists. It's not for any of the reasons or people
> that seem to recently be the focus of the WMF.

Alas, we're all working for readers (and creating nice environment to  
convert readers into writers).
Collaboration and community is tool to create the value of freely  
accessible knowledge.

Board is not governing the community, either. Board is taking care,  
that organization, that supports the projects, is able to sustain,  
provide tools for contributors, provide access to users.
Organization is trying to facilitate lots of things, but rarely to be  
'power body'. It is not 'power body', it does not want to exercise  
power.
It is not representational body, it is a body where people spend  
quite some time to discuss and agree on topics, based on various inputs.

> In case you all have forgotten, you work for the community.

In our work, everyone is our community. A kid that tells his parents  
how wikipedia is good for him. A student fighting with his teacher  
about credibility of his sources. Anyone who uses Wikipedia in the  
end ends up to be an advocate. Is advocate part of our community? For  
sure. How many readers of ours are advocates? :)

> The community is not the tight-knit group who post on Foundation-l
> channels, such as Planet Wikimedia or the WMF Blog). The
> community also isn't defined by what the ED's staff or Board says
> it is.

:) indeed, because there is no such definition.

> The community is the millions of anonymous and pseudo-anonymous
> contributors who've put their work into the projects to give a  
> staff a nice
> fat paycheck and let the Board pussyfoot their way around proper
> governance.

Please, show some respect to people for their work, as behind the  
'nice fat' (???) paycheck there are duties and responsibilities, that  
had to be taken care of.

> Out of curiosity: If the entire Board and staff were put up to a  
> public vote
> across /all/ projects (assuming good representation could be assured),
> I wonder how many of them would be with the WMF at the end of the day.

Unfortunately, not all aspects of running an organization are a  
popularity contest.

-- 
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]