[Foundation-l] The fallacy of power

Tue Apr 29 03:05:14 UTC 2008

The Board restructuring appears to have triggered discontent among
some community members. This seems to be in part motivated by the fact
that previous community propositions for the Board to encourage the
exploration of a Volunteer Council by means of a Board resolution were
declined, while at the same time, the structure of the Board was
changed to designate the responsibility for two seats to the chapters.
Another part of the dissatisfaction appears to be rooted in the
perceived lack of public communication about these changes.

I was not part of the Board meeting in San Francisco, and I'm not
speaking from an organizational position, nor am I writing this on the
basis of inside information about the meeting. Based on my own
experience as a former member of the Board and a longtime member of
this community, I would like to offer an alternative interpretation
for what I think is happening here.

My own understanding of this decision is exactly the opposite of what
some people seem to interpret it as: The Board has, through its
decision not to create a Volunteer Council but to encourage community
exploration of self-governance, made an explicit statement that it is
up to volunteers working on the projects to explore and propose
processes to decide what new projects & languages to create, what
decision making processes to use to resolve disputes, what major
software changes to enable, and so forth. The Board and the
organization will be minimally prescriptive in these processes. This
is in the organization's interest, as the top-down method of
implementing decisions affecting the projects doesn't scale well. I
interpret it as encouragement to "be bold" and develop scalable
volunteer-driven processes on all levels.

The Board, through its commitment to bringing in new Board members
with expertise in relevant legal, accounting, fundraising and
governance issues, has made it clear that it understands its
governance obligation and its fiduciary responsibility towards a
tax-exempt non-profit organization. Through its commitment to bringing
in chapters into the governance process, it has made an important
attempt to share lessons and recognize the chapters' role in the
international Wikimedia movement. Through its clear, continuing
commitment to community membership on the Board, it has stated its
long term view that, in order to guard and nurture our values, we need
individuals on the Board who live and breathe these values.

So, what I get from this is:

* The Board has given the community a clear "go" signal to explore
models of self-governance and decision making processes, be they
councils, direct voting, committees, or other processes which work.
This allows for the rapid, parallel evolution of mechanisms of
self-governance and a "survival of the fittest" decision-making
processes. That's a very real alternative to a top-down decision to
explore one particular model (Volunteer Council) and, arguably,
preferable.

* The Board has attempted to develop a reasonable balance in its own
composition to address the challenge of running a multi-million dollar
non-profit organization while preserving the key values that allow it
to exist.

But, the Board is _meant_ to not get involved in daily operations, it
is _meant_ to not try to make project-level decisions that cannot
scale, it is _meant_ to structure itself so that it can competently
hire an Executive Director when needed, so that it can evaluate her
performance, so that it can raise funds for the organization, so that
it can make sure that we are in compliance with the legal requirements
for organizations like ours. You will not get a Board that can do that
by simply picking the people with the highest edit counts and giving
them responsibility over the organization. That's a way to create an
organization that has good intentions but which cannot necessarily
balance its books or hire competent staff. In other words, it's a way
to create purely a social movement and not an organizational support
layer for one. But WMF is the support layer: We all are the social
movement.

Our Board of Trustees is present on wikis, IRC and mailing lists; it's
electronically reachable and responsive in ways I would posit no other
Board of Trustees of a similarly large organization is. This, and the
absence of other decision making bodies, creates a fallacy of power:
the false belief that, because the Board exists and participates, it
represents an operationally involved ruling body _for_ the social
movement, rather than an organizational body for _corporate
oversight_. But, really, the primary function of the Board is to
sustain and protect the organization. And, if anything, these Board
meeting outcomes are the Board's acknowledgment of the fact that the
true power rests with the community volunteers, and that the Board
should not interfere with community processes.

You can disagree, but the easiest way to prove this point is to look
at the decisions the Board actually makes:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions

The most recent Board resolution that was highly project-facing was
the one on our content licensing, from December 2007:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:License_update

And this resolution explicitly called for a community decision making
process. Other recent resolutions include:
* Approval of chapter organizations
* Approval of financial statements
* Approval of a credit card usage policy
* Approval of the job description for the Executive Director
* Update of the gift policy

What relevance do these decisions have to your daily project work? In
contrast, what relevance do they have to WMF as an organization
(rather than a social movement)? What qualifications do you need to
vote on such resolutions? I believe that the proposed Board structure
is a very reasonable response to these questions. It's no coincidence
or conspiracy that the current Board, made primarily of respected and
trusted community volunteers, has reached the conclusions it has.

It's easy to direct negative energy towards listservs and wiki pages.
It's much harder to direct positive energy towards solutions that
actually work. It seems to me that volunteer energy would now be most
usefully guided towards developing mechanisms of self-governance, per
project and across projects. Decision-making bodies and processes have
arisen, on a small scale, without any Board involvement. The challenge
is to scale them up. And it's a challenge to all of us.

Erik