Hoi,
First, I am a candidate for the board of the Wikimedia Foundation. I have taken time to see what people say, not react immediately.
For María to become a consultant, I am of two minds. She is probably best placed to support the implementation of the strategy as defined. With both the director and the chair of the board left in quick succession this will help make the roadmap practical. On the other hand, I do agree with Jan Bart and in addition it can be considered "ruling from the grave". Yes, the strategy is to be implemented but we have to be aware of our missing public.
This is the reason for my candidature; we have not developed other languages and we foster the false assumption that it is only communities that build our projects. The functionality that we have may be wonderfully localised but it is the software itself that does not truly support other languages. This is often because functionality is based on the demands of the biggest Wikipedias. It is easy to define user stories and show how a difference can be made. Everytime when this subject was broached, promises were made for the future. The numbers show that this bias is entrenched; compare the world population with the population that speaks English and it should be obvious that we have a gap that needs to be narrowed. Yes, there are easy and obvious things we can cheaply do. I want us to put a genuine effort, find a potential public, serve a new public and in this way build our communities.
Thanks,
GerardM