[Foundation-l] RfC: Key priorities for my work

[Anthony]

On 9/23/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I am waiting for the result to be certified, I would like to ask
> all of you to send me your thoughts -- privately or publicly -- on
> what you think the key priorities should be for my work as Board
> member.

As was correctly pointed out by Ant, you phrased the question as what
*your* priorities should be as *a* Board Member.  However, I'm going
to answer in terms of what I think the priorities should be for the
Board as a whole.

In terms of immediate priorities, the board needs to reconcile the
bylaws with reality, and the board needs to resume publication of
financial reports.  I'm not going to get into details in terms of how
the bylaws should be reconciled with reality other than to suggest
that the community should be involved at all steps in the process.  In
terms of the financial reports, it appears that Brad is already
working on this, so hopefully this will be an easy task.

In terms of short-term priorities, communication between the board and
the rest of the community is still, in my opinion, lacking.  I hope it
won't be necessary to hire anyone to fix this situation, but if the
committees and other volunteers can't reconcile this maybe it'll have
to be squeezed into someone's job description.

Longer term (but still on the order of less than a year), I'd like to
see the board press hard to ensure that the projects are better
integrated.  Single sign-on has been talked about for years now.
Frankly, I don't think single sign-on is all that important, what's
much more important is integration of user talk pages, watch lists,
etc.

The other longer term issue is facilitating new projects.  Wikinews
and Wikimedia Commons have been progressing nicely in my opinion, and
I think they are a good example of projects which were set up after
the Foundation came into being.  As the board gets more and more away
from the day-to-day operations of the projects, which it seems they
will be doing, I'd like to see the Foundation churning out more
successful projects like this.  While it's true that there has to be a
certain level of community interest before there can be a new project,
I believe the board has a lot that it can do in facilitating the
organization of such interest.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of things.  Especially in terms of longer
term issues, I've only mentioned a couple that stood out in my mind.
One of the priorities for the longer term is for the board to define
just what it's priorities are going to be :).

Anthony