Brion Vibber wrote:
Michael R. Irwin wrote:
A bigger stacked Board micromanaging the community will leave us in the future right where we are now.
I'm curious.
What can the board and management (whatever its structure) *do* that will be better?
There were some other posts that had some interesting ideas so I will be concise and off the cuff.
The Board and Management could acknowledge that the Projects manage themselves according to approved procedures and core values and focus on delivering a robust, adequate infrastructure. If a problem is identified the Board or manager should have a project point of contact .... say a project mailing list ???? where they can go to request appropriate attention.
By placing the burden on the Board, management, and/or employees to come convince consensus driven, roughly democratic groups of interested volunteers there is a problem to be resolved our project leadership, local expertise, and community structures would regain some relevance.
The Board could respond in a timely manner to project proposals and other activities requested from the communities of volunteers. The easiest way to kill any initiative in any organization is to simply keep iteratively requesting unjustifed rework. Wikiversity is basically defunct via this technique.
Any decent secretary or executive assistant could set up a suspense prioritized action queue and coordinate emails between the Board members so that any given activity that was accepted for action by the Board goes back out with a decision within a reasonable period of time. Say a month. This assumes that communications procedures are nailed down and followed by the Board Members.
What are examples of things a hypothetically ideal management would do *right* that the present management is not?
Eliminate uncertainty by making decisions in accordance with due process. Notice this requires some due process to be defined. Wikiversity has been blindsided repeatedly after it tackled new requirements levied by the Board. Nobody likes to play rigged games where others can change the rules arbitrarily.
I suspect this would be a much more productive discussion than constantly claiming the board is "stacked" -- which of course it is, intentionally and openly so. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that; this isn't a democracy, it's a business (even if a non-profit one) and the board's job is not to represent the users, it's to ensure that the company implements its goals (as stated in the bylaws).
I disagree. It is predominantly a participatory informal "democracy/committee" process in the projects and the volunteers in many cases are voting with their feet and manhours. Our micromanagers cry here on the mailing list that nobody wants to participate or help do the drudge work. Apparently nobody wants to preemptively participate in effective policy making rather than wait and come cry about decisions when they are finally made by somebody else. Basically the projects have no way to ratify any policy that cannot be arbitrary overturned.
Further, there were a lot of people who donated a lot of time before Jimbo stacked the Board. He was not the only stakeholder or philanthropist with a vested interest at the time of that unilateral action. Like it or fork it is not an appropriate response when other stakeholders cannot match the hardware or bandwidth requirements. Great sound bite though.
A further problem is that the bylaws were written to express Jimbo's goals, not those of the community at large. People keep claiming there is no cabal. I would very interested in exactly how many people participated in filling out the initial paperwork for the Foundation. Further, it is Jimbo and only Jimbo who interprets those goals. Wikiversity is a natural fit with the existing projects and the slogans and bylaws yet it is not being implemented despite overwhelming community support.
If there's something that management needs to *do* which will actually be better served by a new management structure or new board members, then by all means let's talk about it, but let's not put the cart before the horse.
What first, then how.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
What would be a redefinition of our concepts of customers and suppliers. The projects are the Wikimedia Foundation's customers who create the information the Foundation wishes to be delivered worldwide to other customers/users. Yet the projects are treated as property which can be controlled by Board.
The Foundation needs to manage the infrastructure and let the projects manage themselves. The large successful projects will fall right in line with the overall principals of neutrality and freedom of information because it was the successful articulation/evolution of these that feuled Wikipedia's explosive growth. The projects that drift inappropriately will fail and fade. I agree that the Foundation must enforce the core principals that were articulated to receive project approval for Foundation hosting but this must be seen as an impersonal, neutral, enforcement by the Foundation, not a possibly arbitrary or biased or uninformed judgement by a single individual.
Standard tasks should be defined where possible with specific scopes and procedures. People like credit. An effective manager should be able to devise a way to give credit to the volunteers or paid staff as they completet the tasks he has prioritized or scheduled.
Let us consider the old saw: lead, follow or get out of the way. A problem right now is that many of the volunteers have little or no idea when "leadership" at the top Foundation level has gotten out of the way. Every thing slows or stalls until somebody invites leadership to come microdecide and as a result the Board gets ever more overloaded.
How is an interesting question.
Unstacking the Board would immediately solve many problems at the strategic organizational level. It would restore credibility to the Board with some factions while reassuring the projects that there was truly an entity that could restrain Jimbo from running amok on Wikibooks.
It would also begin to define the Foundation as an entity independent of Jimbo that will be capable of surviving indefinately. Notice this is required to meet future committments to deliver free information made while requesting donations from participants creating and using the information. The Foundation has a clear Fiduciary responsibility to those donors who sent cash in good faith even if it values the time of our other philanthropists at zero responsibility or committment.
regards, lazyquasar