Andrew Lih wrote:
It's clear your objections run deep -- you seem
have a standing
problem with the entire idea of a board of trustees that is, well,
trusted with the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation. This can be
seen also in your strong bias and mistrust concerning the governance
of nonprofits. If this is so, your issues are not with the
particulars of how we are going about things, but of an entire concept
of the board.
Oh, having a board is fine, so long as it only handles unimportant
things. We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought
it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires
non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more
people. For one reason or another, Jimbo decided it would be a good
show of community participation and democratic fuzziness and whatnot if
we elected two of these five members, and so we did.
As a legal matter, the board has authority over the project; as a moral
matter, it does not. Jimbo was previously the benevolent dictator, and
to a large extent remains so, but he rarely took decisions unilaterally,
instead guiding a consensus process and respecting the outcomes of that
process even if he occasionally personally would have done things
otherwise. I'd expect the board to at the very least do no more than he
previously did, and ideally to work to continue the process he starting
of devolving decision-making to the community at large.
In short, boards are unwiki, but we are required by law to have one, so
we do.
However, this community has decided to go ahead with
the board, so
that designated individuals can spend more time on issues that need
it. This includes fundraising and building links among the different
wikis, which have both been our weak spot. Your characterization of
these meetings as "perks" that happen "behind closed doors" is
misleading and disingenuous. No one has suggested anything of the
sort, and Wikipedians should have every confidence that things will be
open and inclusive.
I don't see how they will be open and inclusive unless the Foundation is
prepared to pay for hundreds of Wikipedians to attend them. If they
involve only a minutely small percentage of the users, then they are
worse than no meeting at all, and bias decision-making towards those
with the resources to attend.
You've cited H.Cheney's comment, while
conveniently leaving out
others' (including my own) positive experiences in working with
nonprofits and the benefits of face to face meetings for this type of
collaboration. The use of "social and networking events" as a
pejorative is odd considering Wikipedia is one of the largest social
software systems and collaborative projects in the world.
Wikipedia is indeed a social and collaborative system, but it takes
place online, on a large scale. If the Foundation can come up with
funding so that any significant subset of its users can meet somewhere,
or even any significant subset of one of its language encyclopedias can
meet, I would not object to that. However, so far there have been no
proposals for that, only proposals for small cliques of users to meet,
which I feel is detrimental to the project on a whole. All important
work should take place online, in public, with as full participation as
possible, not take place behind closed doors and then reported after the
fact.
As for other comments on travel reimbursements as a good thing, one of
them even cited EU-funded projects, which are pretty notorious for being
full of wasteful perks (
http://www.iht.com/articles/521419.html among
thousands of related articles).
-Mark