[Foundation-l] Board of Trustees activity report - May-June 2011

[phoebe ayers]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 12:16 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> phoebe ayers, 04/08/2011 07:29:
> > The Board has been working on a report of our activities; please find the
> > first report, covering May and June of this year, below. This is a short
> > summary, meant to help share our work with the community and movement,
> and
> > help make Board work and trustee activities more accessible&
>  transparent.
>
> Thank you!
> For the next reports, you might consider to define the scope of the
> report better. For instance, it's probably not suitable for
> blog.wikimedia.org because it's not for the general public, but this
> means that you can worry less about some things which are difficult to
> explain.
> As far as I understand, it's meant to cover the activities of all board
> members and represent the board as a whole: this is going to be very
> hard work! But another consequence is that it will contain only
> "official board positions", as opposed to e.g. the point of view of the
> 3 or 3+2 community members. This is up to you, but then I don't
> understand the purpose of the first half of the report (before "Other
> Board work"): as it is, it might be just a duplicate of the resolutions
> and minutes on the wiki; not more informative, nor significantly
> shorter, nor providing different insights. In other words, you could
> consider to drop that part reducing your work and the community could
> just learn to read the resolutions (which are few and short) and minutes
> (which are not so long after all) on the wiki. For those who don't know,
> there are also feeds for them (as for any wiki page, hence quite raw,
> but still serving the purpose).
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Resolutions&feed=atom&action=history
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Meetings&feed=atom&action=history
>
> Nemo
>
> Thanks Nemo!
It is true that the first part of the report is a duplication of the
resolutions & meeting minutes that we publish. My assumption here was that
not everyone keeps up with all of the board resolutions etc :) It is also
nice to have a single record of everything we did in a given time period; I
was mainly trying to be complete. Of course those who are already familiar
with all of this should feel free to skip over this section. (But if there's
a way to make it more useful, that would be great -- and if others think it
should be dropped as well let me know!)

I'm not sure why you say this is not for the general public. I would not
mind if the general public read it -- there's nothing confidential. The only
reason to not disseminate it as-is on the blog is that it is kind of dry and
not especially well written :)

My hope here is that the reports would be: a) a way for our wider community
(i.e. people who don't follow the wmfwiki) to know what the board is up to;
b) a way for everyone, internally and externally, to see some of the other
work the board does that is not well known -- for instance the board
governance committee stuff; c) highlight some of the awesome work our
trustees do on their own out in the world with communities and outreach.
(And maybe some of these activities will turn into more interesting blog
posts!)

I imagine that the people potentially interested in this might be
Wikimedians, internal folks of all types, and even external people like our
partners. Part of my motivation is to answer the question "what does the
board do???" which seems to come up at every board election :)

At any rate I will be working on July-August this weekend and then I expect
it will take a couple of weeks for the board members to get all of their
submissions in and review the report. And then I hope to refine the schedule
so we can get it out sooner. So please do keep the comments coming and let
me know what needs to be changed.

best,
phoebe