On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
- Openness - I think the entire board is strongly in support of
openness and transparency, and in particular with respect to committee processes. The difficulty has been in how to properly balance openness with the need for privacy and discretion in certain matters. Your first platform plank was to work on "a clear and sensible proposal as to how we can guarantee transparency, openness, participation and accountability within these Wikimedia committees." Bravo!
Err you might want to watch certain episodes of yes minister before using phrasing like that. You risk worrying a section of the brits.
- "To avoid both extremes, we need to build a diverse Board whose
members are trained to resolve conflicts" - bravo again. I hope that you will support me in efforts to quickly expand the board to include not only more people from the community, but also people who can help us in other ways with professional expertise and/or public credibility. Obviously, this is to be a hot topic for the October board retreat, and quite possibly sooner.
Any chance of some librarians?
- Developing world projects - I strongly support that we, as a
community and organization, turn our attention increasingly to a more global perspective. We know that the elections for the board (just to cite one example) were heavily skewed towards the European languages, and specifically Western and Northern European languages.
Stand by for some more if EU enlargement has the effect it normaly does.
It is easy to make a prediction: within 10 years, Arabic Wikipedia (just to pick one example) will be larger than German Wikipedia (for instance) today.
Well it would be if most major arabic speaking countries were not blocking us by 2008. Still I'm sure we will handle that.