On 6/3/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
So, Wikimedia is shaped by people who feel that the very philosophy that made WP a success is not applicable to organizations.
And Erik wonders why I felt that he misrepresented my views in that meeting.
With all due respect, I wasn't talking about you above.
The main beef that I had with Erik in that log was that he represented to the people there, that I felt that we should not recruit for the executive director position from within the community. That was shocking to me, because I am strongly committed to our deep community roots and deep community focus.
My comments on IRC were based on your own statements, on IRC and on the mailing list. When the CEO position was discussed, I pointed out that there are qualified people in the community who can acquire some of the additional skills needed, while being able to connect to Wikimedians better than a complete outsider. I gave our current CFO, Daniel Mayer, as an example.
To this, Daniel responded:
"While it would be nice to have a Wikimedian fill this role, I don't think that is a critical thing for the board to consider." [http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-January/005831.html]
Your response was: "I think that's exactly right." You then continued: "There are people out there with decades of experience with public-facing international charities with a strong community focus who can very quickly be trained in our community norms. And if they already know about Wikipedia, and have edited, then so much the better."
I think, based on these comments and some on IRC about the community/organization split, the statement of myself that: "I doubt [Jimmy] will care much for looking in the community for an [Administrative Director]" was justifiable. Certainly, I do not feel that your reaction -- to write on a public wiki page that I "deeply misrepresented" you, and "that anyone reading this should take with a huge grain of salt everything, and I mean absolutely everything, that [Erik] said" was appropriate, or an example of how members of the community should be engaged.
Even you will probably admit that you have a history of making vague, non-committal statements, and of course there are good reasons for doing so. However, vagueness opens up the potential for misinterpretation. It is hardly fair to blame this on those who are trying to make sense of your comments.
And your remarks in this thread have been exemplary for the same kind of vague, non-committal statements of reassurance. Instead of "I think we should have two more community-elected members by the end of August", you'll say something like "We continue to be deeply committed to the ideal of increasing the number of people on the Board, and whether or not these are community members is secondary to meeting our charitable goals and thoughtfully finding the most qualified people to help us do so" (made up quote). Well, what does something like this tell us? Does Jimbo want more community-elected members? Does he want to bring in someone he feels is right for the job? What's going to happen? Same with the CEO question.
Frankly, there's a need for less Jimbospeak, and more concrete promises and commitments on the public record.
I think a lot of people feel tthat the foundation is opaque because they choose to not get involve
When the SP committee was created, I immediately expressed my interest in joining. I saw the hope that this was a long needed step away from exactly the kind of centralization and micromanagement that had led me to resign as CRO (and which now seems to be generally acknowledged). I pointed out my record working on Special Projects, from many different kinds of partnerships to their technical realization.
I was told by Danny, immediately, that he would oppose me, that I had "quit Wikimedia", that the committee was "beneath me". You also told me, privately, that you did not want me on SP. Does that make me feel welcome to help? If someone who _wants_ to help, who _has_ a record, faces these barriers, how much harder is it for those who are not well known, but yet highly qualified?
GerardM, who has a more impressive track record in special projects than I do -- there would be no Kennisnet partnership and no WiktionaryZ project without him, applied for membership and was rejected. Frankly, this is not an example of an open organization that accepts the most qualified people to do the right thing. It's an example of "face by face" selection processes. No amount of rhetoric is going to change that.
I agree with you, of course, that the organization is not becoming more opaque. It is becoming bigger and involving more people, and that is good. But the potential for Wikimedia is to be so much more than just a shell for a few projects. The potential for Wikimedia is to build hundreds, thousands of partnerships, to form knowledge networks, to engineer the technology that will be needed to take free content to the next level. Quite a lot of this work _needs_ to be done within the context of the WMF, not the projects, because that is how you can engage people in the outside world. This cannot be done with the current organizational model.
InstantCommons (see [[m:InstantCommons]]) is a perfect example of that. We met with Kennisnet in February, and they basically said "Wow, good idea, let's do it! But, we would like the WMF to authorize it." Since then, the project has been in organizational limbo, moving slowly as molasses through several layers of bureaucracy, from SP to Legal to SP to Board and back again, with complex contracts being drawn up when all that needed to be done was giving them a call and letting Gerard manage the project. This is about building a relationship with a developer in Ghana, who could have started work on this project as early as March. Now it's June and we still can't go ahead. We're talking about a EUR 5000-10000 project. How on Earth do you intend to manage large grants with that kind of attitude towards project realization?
I won't even get into some of the other project ideas that are out there, promises that have been made, and so on. Suffice it to say that we are nowhere near fulfilling our potential, and that doesn't bode well for future personal appeals that make the same empty comments about Africa. These will get stale _very_ quickly if we don't demonstrate success. Sure, professionals are important in getting our act together. I consider myself a professional in what I do, which is to solve complex problems. And I want to network all of those who are professionals in something, regardless of whether we will actually end up paying them.
You say that people do not get involved enough. Well, when the committees were first proposed, I immediately wrote a long analysis of some concerns regarding their setup and future: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-January/005828.html
Response: zero. Not from the Board, not from the community. If you do not engage the community in even very basic and simple dialogue like this, and only actually start talking when - as now - a lot of people start complaining, then something is fundamentally wrong about the way we communicate.
Here's an idea: Why not ask the community to draft up resolutions on Meta? And why not start with the one about keeping the committees as open as possible?
Another question: How much does Tim Shell actually participate in any Board-level decision making, meetings, resolutions, open and private discussions? If this is not about your control, why is he still on the Board?
Erik