Hoi, Really.
We have had a rough patch where management and people in the WMF were at odds. We have a rough patch where people for all kinds of reason decide to no longer be a member of the WMF board. It is no wonder that things are not as they should be as a consequence. When you add the negativity out of much of the community re the work of the WMF. No is the default answer, negativity the standard attitude. I think the WMF given such circumstances does really well.
When you want to stick to the facts, it is also how you present them. When 314 people vote, I find this almost an insignificant number given the size of our community.
So from your position the glass is half empty, I see it is half full. I think it can only get better and that is not how I experience your position. In the mean time I do not see how the "community" helps in this. For the community the board is very much peripheral to the objective and imho too much is made of the board. As to Mr Geshuri he is not the only person who is no longer on the board.
This whole notion of "understanding to the next decimal point" of what happened makes us a reactive organisation and to put it bluntly that is not what we need. We need an organisation that is proactive and that will only happen when there is some trust. This whole drive to get more "transparency" will only dig us a bigger hole.
So do consider what it is that we are to achieve and what your role is. My role is simple, I want us to embrace approaches and technology that will particularly support the other languages. I want us to do a much better job at understanding what our readers are looking for and it may be well intentioned but the current approach will not improve things and will only constrain our ability to achieve our expressed goals. Thanks, GerardM
On 2 May 2016 at 11:21, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps we could stick to facts?
In the very recent case of Arnnon Geshuri, the WMF board of trustees proved themselves to be completely out of touch with the community.[1][2] 314 Wikimedians took part in the vote of no confidence, hardly just "malcontents", and 95% of those that took part voted directly against the stated position of the board, who still remain happy with their decision to keep Geshuri as trustee, and have not apologized or even changed a single part of their governance processes, despite vague unmeasurable offers to look into it.
With regard to "[the WMF board] delivering services that are of a high quality", all the metrics that the WMF report show the opposite. The WMF consistently fail to meet the performance targets they set for themselves, as you can see from the most recent quarterly report, they "missed", i.e. "failed", 35% of all their objectives.[3] In the Retail & Telecoms businesses I have worked in, a pattern of poor performance like this would see speedy major investment in change and improvement, including major changes at the board level.
It is an easy and lazy response to shout down objections by deriding everyone that has a complaint a malcontent or a troll. However after a few years of the WMF board failing to improve their self-governance or transparency, it's time to actually change things rather than accepting soft soap and political position statements that hold nobody to account.
Links
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Vote_of_no_confidence_o... 2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35411208 3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Quart...
Fae
On 2 May 2016 at 06:58, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The most important thing about the board and the WMF is that they enable what we do. The dependence on them delivering services that are of a high quality is something they deliver. At the same time there is a coterie of "Wikipedians" that want to remake the WMF in their own image. They have proven not to be interested in our projects really. They have been challenged to consider practical things that will deliver much better quality for Wikipedia but it proved not to be what they are interested
in.
Arguably there is a crisis. But the crisis has less to do with the WMF
than
with some in the community. They call themselves the community. IMHO they are malcontents; they have no agenda but single issues that will not help us achieve what the WMF is about. Thanks, GerardM
On 1 May 2016 at 23:36, Rogol Domedonfors domedonfors@gmail.com wrote:
It seems that the engagement between the Board and the Community has
broken
down, to the point that there may be a crisis of confidence developing. Perhaps members of this list would care to express their views at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard#Crisi...
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