On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Tim Landscheidt tim@tim-landscheidt.dewrote:
Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
[...] "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." is a good principle for maintaining the status quo, it isn't a good principle if you want progress. The job isn't done yet, so progress would be good. If you want progress you have to be willing to implement enhancements as well as fixes. One of the main fundamental problems I have found with the WMF is with regards to prioritising. Often the WMF doesn't prioritise the same things as the community seems to want. The dumps that Anthony mentioned is a good example of that - a significant number of community members complained about the dumps not working for years before much progress was made and they still aren't completely working. The tech team prioritised other things over the dumps, had the community had the final say they may have done otherwise (or they may not, no detailed discussion of the options ever took place in public so it is difficult to know what conclusion would have been reached).
Given the fact that no candidate for the board seems to have campaigned prominently for this issue in this year's elec- tion and it does not even seem to have been mentioned in the two before, I do not see why the board should have decided otherwise.
Well, personally I was responding to the "it ain't broke" part, rather than proposing a fix. I don't think having all the board members elected by the current Special:Boardvote rules would fix the dumps. In fact, I think if anything it would keep the dumps broken longer.
One of the biggest problems is that the WMF doesn't really have "a community". The individual projects have communities, which to some extent overlap, I wouldn't call that the WMF community. Activity on a single project is all that's needed for eligibility to vote for board members. There's no need to even feign commitment to the larger goals of the foundation as a whole.
I guess there's now a wiki for the WMF community: strategy.wikimedia.org.