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