Christophe Henner wrote:
Basically it's making the legal team life's easier when they need to do small and/or quick changes. They don't have to go through the whole resolution process to change a comma.
We're still informed and are talking with staff about those changes.
As for responsibility, we decided to delegate responsibility, but at the end of the day we still will have to answer the community's question :)
Hi Christophe,
Thank you for your replies in this thread so far. I'm still confused about this resolution and its impact.
Were there a lot of regular changes needed to policies, so much so that the Board had a backlog of some kind? If the changes were as small as you suggest, such as punctuation tweaks, I would think these would be quick and easy for the Board to review and approve. If there are regular and more substantive policy changes happening, I'd like to better understand why these changes are happening. And I'd like to better understand why eliminating review and approval by the Board of Trustees for substantive policy changes is a good thing.
You mention legal staff and lawyers, but for many people, I don't think it's very comforting to know that you're making it easier for lawyers to make changes to these policies. While I'm sure the legal staff at the Wikimedia Foundation is great, I think there's a lot of benefit to having the somewhat elected (err, selected) Board review and approve policy changes that affect every Wikimedia wiki. Why would we change this?
It seems worth pointing out that the Wikimedia Foundation General Counsel position is currently vacant, so when you mention the legal team wanting to make policy changes, many wonder who specifically is wanting to make changes and why.
More to the point, while this e-mail thread mentions the legal team, the resolution is far broader than that. The Executive Director could appoint a Wikimedia Foundation intern or even an outside contractor as the responsible party for a global policy now, with the unchecked power to alter, revoke, or change the terms? Anyone who reads through this PDF from November 2016 can see that this is not exactly a theoretical concern: https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?curid=24446. There are people who want to enact and enforce their policies across Wikimedia wikis and the Board of Trustees has now greatly expanded the group of people who can alter global policies. This is a pretty big and sudden shift.
To Lodewijk's point about consultation and notification, was/is the Board of Trustees planning to announce this seemingly large and significant change to the affected Wikimedia communities?
MZMcBride