However, many people don't see what the Advisory Board does, and in fact, there have been serious questions about the utility of a Board that seems to do nothing (useful or otherwise). Can you let us know what activities the Advisory Board carries out, and give us some indication of how often they do it?
There's no simple answer to this since each person acts individually rather than the board working as a group, except for occasions such as the strategy planning type sessions as previous Wikimanias - the outcomes of which are at http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Advisory_Board. Examples of the sorts of thing people do include being involved in the committee for identifying potential candidates for appointment to the board of trustees, advising Sue on different issues, looking into ways of improving OTRS, or working with the FSF and Creative Commons on the license change.
Angela